The editor-in-chief of a journal updated a retraction notice to acknowledge the data in the paper were “completely plagiarized” following allegations in a letter to the editor that were the subject of a Retraction Watch post last week.
The original retraction, requested by the authors, cited only “major errors in data.” The notice for the October 2023 paper, which is signed by the Indian Journal for Critical Care Medicine (IJCCM) editor-in-chief Atul Kulkarni, now reads:
Following scrutiny of the article further and other facts brought to the notice of the IJCCM, I have decided to change the reason for the retraction. This article is withdrawn after having been found that the data was completely plagiarized (in toto) from the work of another researcher.
The undated notice was updated January 23, a day after our reporting about the journal noted that a letter to the editor of the journal had claimed that the work had been stolen.
But according to Sundara Kannan, the researcher mentioned in the notice who wrote the letter to the editor in November 2024, the researchers had plagiarized the data from his 2022 post-graduate thesis. The data were presented at a 2022 conference, which required electronic submission to the India Society for Critical Care Medicine, an organization associated with IJCCM, according to their website.
Neither Kulkarni or managing editor Prashant Kaushik responded to our immediate request for comment. Neither did Kannan nor the paper’s corresponding author, Nitesh Gupta.
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