The International Journal of Neuroscience, an Informa Healthcare journal, has retracted a paper it published earlier this year after learning that the article was the doctoral work of another scientist — not listed among the authors — that had appeared previously in a Persian-language journal.
The retraction notice, admirably thorough, explains what happened with the paper:
The Editors and Publisher would like to inform the readers the following article has been retracted from publication in the International Journal of Neuroscience:
Mohamad Goldust, Mahnaz Talebi, Jafar Majidi, Mohammad Amin Rezazadeh Saatlou, Elham Rezaee. Evaluation of antiphospholipid antibodies in youths suffering from cerebral ischemia. Int J Neurosci. 2013 Mar;123(3):1247–57.
Dr. Mahnaz Talebi contacted the Editors of the International Journal of Neuroscience to inform them that this article was a graduation thesis for his student Dr. Mohamadali Arami at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran, and previously published in print and in Persian by the Iranian Journal of Neurology:
Mahnaz Talebi, Jafar Majidi, Mohamadali Arami, Seyed Ali Saderddini. Evaluation of antiphospholipid antibodies in youths suffering from cerebral ischemia. Iran J Neuro. 2005 Spring;15(3):26–34.
Moreover, Dr. Talebi said he was listed as an author of the article published in the International Journal of Neuroscience without his knowledge or consent.
When queried, Dr. Mohamad Goldust, the corresponding author of the article published in the International Journal of Neuroscience, admitted that he listed Dr. Talebi as a coauthor improperly and asked for the manuscript to be retracted; he did not respond to our questions regarding whether this manuscript was previously published in the Iranian Journal of Neurology or whether this manuscript was the original work of the authors listed in the published the International Journal of Neuroscience article. The coauthors listed on the article published in the International Journal of Neuroscience were contacted several times but did not respond to our queries.
Since the article in the Iranian Journal of Neurology was published in Persian, we contacted Dr. Shahriar Nafissi, Editor in Chief of the Iranian Journal of Neurology, who confirmed that the two articles in question were the same.
Our policy in this respect is clear: the International Journal of Neuroscience considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that they have been submitted only to the International Journal of Neuroscience, that they have not been published already, nor are they under consideration for publication or in press elsewhere.
International Journal of Neuroscience published this article in good faith, and on the basis of signed statements made by the corresponding author regarding the originality of their work. The article is withdrawn from all print and electronic editions.
Kelly Lyons & Rajesh Pahwa
Editors-in-Chief
Anna Treadway
Head of Journals Publishing, Informa Healthcare
Nothing more to say about this. This is the second retraction from the IJN in less than two months, and both have been plenty informative. Kudos to Treadway and her group at Informa.
Stealing from powerless grad students, that’s pathetic. One hopes that Goldust (or Gol-durn) et al. manuscripts will be rejected by all journals in the future. But probably not. Set up a publication watch & see what they might publish – and stolen from whom.
This is more than a problem of publishing another’s work. The original article was in Persian in an Iranian journal. If the English version passed peer review and was deemed fit to publish then there is a potential loss to researchers who are not conversant with Persian and cannot access the original article. Perhaps rather than retracting the article, the authors names should be replaced by a correction attributing the work to the original author. If of course the original author agrees.
The problem is that as well as the original author, copyright would have been assigned to the original journal, and the English language journal would have to be prepared to accept a publication that was not original. It does happen, but the moral of the story is that if you have done good work start with the best English language journal.