The Lancet has retracted a decade-old case report by a group from Japan after concluding that the authors misrepresented the originality of the work.
The paper was a case report, titled “Hidden Harm,” by a team at Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo. The authors described a 46-year-old woman with a history of self-harming behaviors they ultimately attributed to a previously undetected neuroendocrine tumor called a pheochromocytoma.
According to the retraction notice, however, the tumor wasn’t the only thing about the paper that was hidden. The authors also misled the Lancet when they said they hadn’t published about the case when they submitted their writeup about the case — a fact unknown to the journal until this summer:
On March 5, 2011, The Lancet published a Case Report by Masahiro Suzuki, Chisato Konno, Sakae Takahashi, and Makoto Uchiyama on pheochromocytoma.1 The Case Report was accepted after we had been informed in writing by the authors that it had not been submitted for publication elsewhere. However, the same case had already been reported by the same authors and published in Seishinka, a Japanese journal of psychiatry.2 The Lancet was alerted to this fact on Aug 2, 2021. Since the Case Report in The Lancet is a duplicate publication, we retract this Case Report.
How did Lancet learn about the 10-year-old duplication? We’ll never know. According to a spokesperson for the journal:
The Lancet group treats all communications between editors and authors or readers as confidential.
Uchiyama did not respond to a request for comment.
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