More than two years after retracting an article by one of its former editors in chief for plagiarism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has retracted six more pieces by the editor, Paul McCrory, a noted concussion researcher in Australia.
The retractions join 11 more of McCrory’s works, including 10 from BJSM and one from Current Sports Medicine Reports.The BJSM, published by The BMJ, is also correcting two additional articles by McCrory.
Troubles for McCrory – for decades “the world’s foremost doctor shaping the concussion protocols that are used by sports leagues and organizations globally,” according to the New York Times – began in 2021 when Steve Haake, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, told the BJSM McCrory had plagiarized a 2000 article by Haake in Physics World. (It would not be the only time the work was plagiarized.)
The journal retracted the offending editorial in February 2022, with McCrory apologizing for the “isolated incident.” McCrory told us at the time that he was “sincerely sorry that this has happened and caused [Haake] and his team hurt.” He said he would be requesting another of his articles be retracted.
By then, however, sleuth Nick Brown had started looking into McCrory’s work, and he found more problems. In October of that year, the journal retracted nine more of McCrory’s single-authored editorials, and placed expressions of concern on nearly 40, the total they said they could find in their archives. They revised that number upward significantly after we pointed out that we found 78 such articles, and told us the expressions of concern would remain unless they were replaced with retraction notices.
McCrory, whose University of Melbourne email address no longer seems to work, has resigned from key posts in the wake of the scandal. The BJSM said he agreed with the new retractions.
In a statement today, the journal said the retractions and corrections “conclude BMJ’s investigation into research integrity issues concerning Paul McCrory.” The University of Melbourne had also requested an investigation, the journal said.
“As no further concerns have been raised with BMJ about Dr McCrory’s authorship in BMJ journals, no further action will be taken,” Helen Macdonald, the BMJ’s publication ethics and content integrity editor, said in the statement.
Macdonald left open the possibility the McCrory saga is not over: “But should any further allegations be made about Dr McCrory’s work published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine or in any of the other titles in BMJ’s journal portfolio, these will be investigated.”
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It would be helpful if your articles included a percentage of papers by an author that have been retracted. There is a difference if 17/100 papers have been retracted then if it’s 17/25 or 17/18, etc. I know that even if it’s 17/100 there might be more retractions to-come, but an observer and not a scientist, a percentage would give me a bunch better sense of how bad the work of the person being discussed has been discovered to be.