A group of arthritis researchers in China have lost a 2019 paper which was effectively an English-language reprint of an earlier article in a Chinese journal. Two of the authors blamed a “misunderstanding of the academic rules” on the part of their colleagues for the duplication.
The article, “The clinical significance of serum sCD25 as a sensitive disease activity marker for rheumatoid arthritis,” appeared in the Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology. But, as the retraction notice explains, the work wasn’t original:
We, the Editor and Publishers of the Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology, have retracted the following article:
H Sun, Y Wang, H Yao, L Wang, S Wu, Y Si, Y Meng, J Xu, Q Wang, X Sun & Z Li (2019). The clinical significance of serum sCD25 as a sensitive disease activity marker for rheumatoid arthritis. Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology 48(5). DOI: 10.1080/03009742.2019.1574890.
The above article has been retracted as a result of an article with a significant overlap in content having been published in the Journal of Peking University (Health Sciences) as
Xu Jia-jia, Wang Yan, Sun He, Jia Ru-lin, Zhang Xue-wu, Meng Yang, Ren Li-li, Sun Xiao-lin (2018). Clinical significance of detection of soluble interleukin 2 receptor alpha chain in the assessment of rheumatoid arthritis disease activity. Journal of Peking University (Health Sciences) 50(6):975–80. DOI: 10.19723/j.issn.1671-167X.2018.06.006. The authors have taken full responsibility for this error and have agreed to the retraction.
Accompanying that statement is the following comment from two of the authors:
We, the co-first author and corresponding author of the retracted paper ‘The clinical significance of serum sCD25 as a sensitive disease activity marker for rheumatoid arthritis. Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology, published online, DOI: 10.1080/03009742.2019.1574890’, apologize to the journal and readers for our error.As the leaders of the research team of this study, in late June 2019, when the paper was published early online, we noticed that some of the co-authors had published another research paper in Chinese language in a local journal, ‘Journal of Peking University (Health Sciences) 50(6):975–80’, without fully informing us that there was a significant overlap in content of these two papers. The authors of the latter paper did this because they thought that publishing a paper in Chinese language would not contradict our submission to Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology in English. Clearly, this is a misunderstanding of the academic rules. We immediately reported this issue to the Editor and proposed the retraction of our paper from SJR before its publication in print. Here, we apologize to the journal and readers for our failure of supervision and management in the publication of data by our team, and also apologize to the co-authors who were not involved in publishing the Chinese paper. We take full responsibility for this error.
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The quotation marks in the headline lends a certain sarcasm to it. This is uncalled for. People took responsibility and the initiative to inform the journal, and took the blame even if the problem seems to have arisen elsewhere. If these authors had not alerted the journal, nobody would have discovered the problem, frankly speaking.
The only problem is that too much of the work appears to have been done outside the eyes, and hence participation, of the corresponding and first authors.
The journal editor and publisher could have given more thought to the pros and cons of retraction, and could have opted to let the article stand but publish an editorial explaining why that decision might be justified in this case.
The primary article in Chinese is accessible only to fluent readers of that language. Republication in English (or any other language) is not misconduct — it’s secondary publication to make the information available to other readers.
The authors didn’t follow the ICMJE procedure for secondary publication (the only procedure gatekeepers feel legitimizes secondary publication). The authors did not intentionally cheat and did not knowingly try to deceive the editor. It looks more like a case of honest error because of inadequate education and training in publication knowledge and skills, and lack of communication among all coauthors.
Who does retraction benefit in this case?
Readers? Not really. They’ll probably ignore the article (even though it was presumably was good enough to be accepted after peer review) on the assumption that it’s fraudulent because of the Retracted label. So they’ll miss some new knowledge. How many will bother to read the editorial statement and discover why it was retacted? And how many without a subscription will pay the 46 euros for 24-hour access to read the authors’ own comments? (Kudos to RW for providing that here.)
The journal? Not really if you consider the potential citations the retracted article will fail to receive.
The publisher? Maybe, if someone there feels good about doing things by the book with no attempt to consider potentially extenuating circumstances. (The journal’s instructions to authors may be partly at fault; from here https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=irhe20&page=instructions it takes a lot of clicking, digging and reading to discover the accepted ICMJE procedure for second-language manuscript submission.)
The authors? They benefited from learning a hard lesson. But their reputation and prestige with their academic peers, superiors and funders may be damaged despite their good intentions.
The authors acted in all honesty and good faith, judging from the information in this RW entry. Authors punished with a retraction for a procedural error, and readers of RW and the journal, could react in two ways. Some may think, “Okay, now I know how to handle secondary publication right”. Others may think, “Okay, now I know how to get better at cheating, and how counterproductive it is to be honest”.
So the net benefit of this retraction to the journals’ readers and wider scientific community is not very clear.
In this case the journal editor might never have found out about the ICMJE-noncompliant secondary publication if the authors themselves had not confessed spontaneously. Retraction was perhaps not the most useful decision for all stakeholders in this particular case.