Coming back up?
Digestive Diseases and Sciences has retracted two papers for duplication.
The first paper, “Membrane-Bound Mucins and Mucin Terminal Glycans Expression in Idiopathic or Helicobacter pylori, NSAID Associated Peptic Ulcers,” was published in October 2012 by a group from Israel and the United States. It found that:
Cytoplasmic MUC17 staining was significantly decreased in the cases with idiopathic ulcer. The opposite was demonstrated for MUC1. This observation might be important, since different mucins with altered sialylation patterns likely differ in their protection efficiency against acid and pepsin.
But, as the retraction notice suggests, that much had been found before:
This article has been retracted due to plagiarism of content published in “Gastric mucin expression in Helicobacter pylori-related, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug-related and idiopathic ulcers” by Doron Boltin, Marisa Halpern, Zohar Levi, Alex Vilkin, Sara Morgenstern, Samuel B Ho, Yaron Niv, published online in the World Journal of Gastroenterology on September 7, 2012, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3748/wjg.v18.i33.4597.
The DDS paper, which has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, does not reference the earlier article.
Much the same story for the second article, “EpCAM: A Potential Antimetastatic Target for Gastric Cancer,” which appeared in 2009. Per the retraction notice:
EpCAM: A Potential Antimetastatic Target for Gastric Cancer by Wenqi Du, Hongzan Ji, Shanshan Cao, Li Wang, Feihu Bai, Jie Liu, Daiming Fan published online in Digestive Diseases and Sciences on November 26, 2009, DOI 10.1007/s10620-009-1033-8 is retracted as the article plagiarized the content from the following article: EpCAM is overexpressed in gastric cancer and its downregulation suppresses proliferation of gastric cancer by Du Wenqi, Wang Li, Cao Shanshan, Chen Bei, Zhang Yafei, Bai Feihu, Liu Jie, Fan Daiming published online on March 18, 2009, by Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology, DOI 10.1007/s00432-009-0569-5.
The paper has been cited 6 times.
Since some of the same authors were on both papers in the second set, it is not correctly labelled as “plagiarism”
“Self-plagiarism” is redundant publication and possible copyright infringement – it is not the misappropriation of another unrelated person’s words or ideas (plagiarism).
Ditto for the first set. It’s always surprising when a bunch of authors decide that their tiny paper deserves publication twice in the world literature. The likelihood of this occurring seems inversely proportional to the importance of the results.