This one is a little odd.
A cardiology paper from China has been retracted because “permission to report these discussions was not sought nor obtained,” though it’s unclear what “the discussions” refers to. The person to whom the discussions are attributed to in the retraction, Ji Bingyang, is not an author on the paper, and none of his papers are cited in the retracted article.
Here’s the notice in the Chinese Medical Journal for “A novel rat model of cardiopulmonary bypass for deep hypothermic circulatory arrest without blood priming”:
The authors wish to retract the two articles because they report here that some discussions in papers on Chinese Medical Journal (Chin Med J 2014; 127(7): 1317-1320; Chin Med J 2014; 127(8): 1541-1544) are obtained by Prof. Ji Bingyang and his group at Fuwai Hospital. Permission to report these discussions was not sought nor obtained from Prof. Ji Bingyang. The authors would like to apologize to Ji Bingyang and his group, the editors and readers of the Chinese Medical Journal.
The authors’ hospital investigated this misconduct behavior on the request of Chinese Medical Journal, and confirmed the fact to the Chinese Medical Journal. Therefore Chinese Medical Journal decided to retract this article on July 20, 2014.
We’ve reached out to the paper’s authors; Bingyang, who “obtained” the discussions; Capital Medical University, which carried out the investigation that led to the retraction; and the journal itself, and will report back with any new information.
Hat tip: Rolf Degen
So, is it one retracted paper, or two? The retraction notice says both.
I read it to mean they used someone else’s findings in the paper, i.e. the authors plagiarised from Bingyang et al?
Somebody might want to suggest to the CMJ that they annotate the retracted papers themselves rather than just letting them stand as though nothing had happened.
I’m mildly impressed that this simple observation has generated three negative responses. The actual papers are here and here. There is no sign that they’ve been retracted, and the PDFs aren’t watermarked.