Post 982 — in which we find plagiarized bone graft paper that grafted from other papers

The Surgeon has retracted a 2012 article by a group from the U.K. who took text from a previously published article. So, you say? Nu?

Well, we found — through relatively little effort — that the plagiarizees were themselves, shall we say, liberal in their use of material from other sources.

The retracted article was titled “Bone graft substitutes: What are the options?,” and it appeared in August 2012. One of the options, we guess, was to steal text.

According to the retraction notice:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Author: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

The authors have plagiarized multiple paragraphs of a previously published paper, Nandi SK et al. Indian J Med Res., 2010 Jul;132:15–30, without proper attribution. All papers published by The Surgeon require the authors to explicitly state that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter. The authors have apologised for this error, and The Surgeon would also like to apologise to its readers.

In the abstract of the Nandi paper, we found this line:

Bone-graft materials usually have one or more components: an osteoconductive matrix, which acts as scaffold to new bone growth; osteoinductive proteins, which support mitogenesis of undifferentiated cells; and osteogenic cells, which are capable of forming bone in the appropriate environment.

It seemed as good as any to run through Google, which we did. And we found this sentence, from a 2002 paper in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery (it’s a pdf):

Bone-graft materials usually have one or more components: an osteoconductive matrix, which supports the in-growth of new bone; osteoinductive proteins, which support mitogenesis of undifferentiated cells; and osteogenic cells (osteoblasts or osteoblast precursors), which are capable of forming bone in the proper environment.

We took a closer look at the Nandi article, and found it to be very close in spots to another 2004 paper, this one in the U.K. version of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. For example, in the Nandi paper we read:

The means of delivering factors to stimulate stem cells in vivo to initiate a process leading to regeneration has long been sought. Success has been restricted by problems of dosage, lack of full activity of recombinant factors and the inability to sustain the presence of the factor for an appropriate length of time. ‘Gene-activated matrices’ are being investigated which compromise plasmids coding for factors in a variety of delivery vehicles.

And, in the JBJS article (a pdf):

The means of delivering factors to stimulate stem cells in vivo to initiate a process leading to regeneration has long been sought. Success has been limited by problems of dosage, lack of full activity of recombinant factors and the inability to sustain the presence of the factor for an appropriate length of time. ‘Gene-activated matrices’ are being investigated which compromise plasmids coding for factors in a variety of delivery vehicles.