Cervical cancer paper is scrapped for duplication in the same journal, year

Over a decade ago, a case report on a woman with cervical cancer and lymphoma was “published twice” by the International Journal of Gynecological Cancer within the span of a few months. The retraction note came out just now.

One copy of the paper appeared in the July 2003 issue of the journal. The second, now-retracted, copy — “Coincidental detection of T-cell rich B cell lymphoma in the para-aortic lymph nodes of a woman undergoing lymph node dissection for cervical cancer: A case report” — was published later that year, in the September issue.

There are just a few cosmetic differences between the headlines and abstracts of the papers  — a “;” instead of a “,”; a change in verb tense, and a typo, for instance. (See a text comparison of the abstracts here.)

The brief retraction note, from the journal’s Editor in Chief Uziel Beller, doesn’t explain what took so long to act on the error — just tosses the blame to whoever was in charge of the journal at the time:

The retracted article was published twice. The duplicated publication occurred under a previous editor and publisher.

We contacted Beller, and first and corresponding author Hüseyin Abali, who now works at Acibadem Adana Hospital in Turkey, for further comment. We will update this post if we hear back.

The duplicated version of the paper has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Hat tip: Rolf Degen

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