The Journal of Neuro-Oncology has retracted a 2009 article on brain tumors for what’s clearly plagiarism — but which is called everything but.
The article was titled “Glioma grading: sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of diffusion and perfusion imaging,” and it came from a group at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, in Trivandrum, India.
Here’s the — rather laughable — retraction notice, which dances around the matter about as deftly as a freshman with the prom queen:
This article published in, Volume 94, Issue 1, pages 87–96, DOI 10.1007/s11060-009-9807-6, has been retracted, as it contains portions of other authors’ writings on the same topic in other publications, without sufficient attribution to these earlier works being given. The principal authors of the paper acknowledged that text from background sources was mistakenly used without proper reference to the original source.
Why not simply say plagiarism here? That’s anyone’s guess — but ours is that the editors were content to let the authors come up with their own explanation for events. And this is, unsurprisingly, the end product.
The paper has been cited 51 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Reblogged this on lab ant and commented:
I always wonder why people simply “copy and paste” other peoples work. I guess this type of “work containing large proportion of other authors’ writings on the same topic in other publications, without sufficient attribution to these earlier works…” will have a high discover rate. At least I hope so.
It would be interesting, which portions of the publication were not cited correctly – and to which extend. I wonder why there is no additional explanation on the data to be original and True – or not, or, if the same data will soon submitted in a corrected or updated version of the manuscript – or not.
Eventually someone is going to post up PDF images of manuscripts and highlight which parts are stolen…kind of like how it’s done with comparing gel or blot images.
Go look at the deja vu database. In the confirmed cases, they have exactly that (although for published papers, not manuscripts)
http://dejavu.vbi.vt.edu/dejavu/
An article by an unknown group in an obscure journal cited 51 times? Sounds rather suspicious to me.
I was wondering as well, but it is also the field of brain tumor research, where there are so many journals and people who need to publish hundreds of papers – and therefore cite many others (often themselves), which helps to get some of the neurology, neuropathology rather high Impact factors – not really comparable to some basic science journals, for example in physics. Almost 20 years ago I published there and was happy to get it published, since I was totally unable to write a single english sentence (so I got some help for the english).
Retraction is on upward trend in that part of the world any way. Thanks to the digital world. But the comment “An article by an unknown group in an obscure journal cited 51 times..” – is a bit harsh. This is why we have retraction problem and retraction watch. Should we look for celebrities and high profile journals for citing an article? Whatever they do is cite-able?
I second that criticism. By association, is the number 2 science publisher, Springer, obscure?
I looked at the papers citing this one, and I fail to see anything suspicious there: many different groups and many different journals.