We here at Retraction Watch HQ are always on the lookout for euphemisms for plagiarism (and other misconduct, of course). Among our favorites are “referencing failure” and the journal that allowed researchers to call plagiarism an “approach” to writing.
Here’s a new one that’s sure to do well with voters.
The journal Rejuvenation Research has retracted a commentary for, well, containing too much of the very text it was supposed to be commenting on.
The editorial was by Giorgio Aicardi, of the University of Bologna, in Italy, and the article Aicardi was writing about was titled “Synaptic distributions of GluA2 and PKMζ in the monkey dentate gyrus and their relationships with aging and memory.” That article had been published in the Journal of Neuroscience last year by a group from Mount Sinai in New York.
We’ll let the notice do the explaining:
“Age-Related Impairment of Visual Recognition Memory Correlates with Impaired Synaptic Distribution of GluA2 and PKMζ in the Dentate Gyrus”: retraction
The commentary “Age-Related Impairment of Visual Recognition Memory Correlates with Impaired Synaptic Distribution of GluA2 and PKMζ in the Dentate Gyrus”; Rejuvenation Res. 2012;15(5):530-533, by G. Aicardi, has been retracted because of an unintended excessive reuse of the text of the commented article (“Synaptic distributions of GluA2 and PKMζ in the monkey dentate gyrus and their relationships with aging and memory”; J. Neurosci. 2012;32(21):7336-7344, by Hara Y, Punsoni M, Yuk F, Park CS, Janssen WG, Rapp PR, Morrison JH).
A new version of the Commentary (“PKMζ-Dependent Maintenance of GluA2 at the Synapse: a Possible Target for Preventing or Treating Age-Related Memory Decline?”), in which the excessive reused text has been removed, is published in this issue of Rejuvenation Res (please use the link below). The author apologizes to Hara and colleagues and to J. Neurosci. for any inconvenience this may have caused.
John Morrison, who’s listed as the last author of the J. Neurosci paper, told us that:
Large portions of the middle of the article were duplicated with the first couple paragraphs and the section on Medical Implications having little if any duplication. By the way, I am not sure at all that it was intentional, but it was substantive.
Aicardi’s paper has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.