Double bind: Duplication of bandaging paper leads to retraction

The Journal of Vascular Surgery is retracting — with vigor — a paper it published online in March after discovering that the authors had published essentially the same article for the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology some months earlier.

Both papers are titled “Randomized controlled trial comparing treatment outcome of two compression bandaging systems and standard care without compression in patients with venous leg ulcers.” The work was funded by the Health, Welfare and Food Bureau of Hong Kong and a grant from Lohmann & Rauscher GmbH & Co KG, a German company that makes compression bandages and other surgical supplies.

According to the retraction notice in JVS:

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article due to redundant publication, self-plagiarism and the authors’ failure to comply with the Journal’s author responsibility policies. The Editor-in-Chief compared “Randomized controlled trial comparing treatment outcome of two compression bandaging systems and standard care without compression in patients with venous leg ulcers” with an article published with the same title in J. Eur. Acad. Dermatol. Venereol., 26 (2012) 102–110. The Editor-in-Chief found that data, tables, images, and whole paragraphs of text in the Journal of Vascular Surgery® article were previously published in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology article.

To submit a manuscript to the Journal of Vascular Surgery®, the corresponding author must complete an “Author Role, Originality, and Competition of Interest Form.” The corresponding author must certify that the work is original, has been written by the stated authors, has not been published previously, and is not under consideration for publication by another journal. If parts of the work or patients included in this manuscript have been previously published, the authors are required to disclose this information to the Editors. The corresponding author, Anneke Andriessen, failed to disclose that the work had been submitted to another journal for review, or that it had been published, on any of the forms collected by the journal or its publisher. The previously published work was not cited as a reference in the Journal of Vascular Surgery® article. The authors failed to follow the Journal’s policies, and therefore the editors were unaware of the previous publication.

The Journal of Vascular Surgery® is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Duplicate publication, self-plagiarism, and lack of compliance with submission policies are not tolerated by the Journal of Vascular Surgery®. We apologize to the readers of the Journal of Vascular Surgery® for this redundant publication.

To which we say, hear, hear! Talk about not trying to cover up the truth. We congratulate the editors, Anton Sidawy (of George Washington) and Bruce Perler (of Johns Hopkins), on their handling of this case.

Andriessen works with a consulting firm in the Netherlands and, as the author info in the JEADV paper states, “participates in various scientific projects with medical device companies and pharmaceutical companies.” One of the authors, an M. Abel, is listed as being head of medical and regulatory affairs at Lohmann & Rauscher.