Cancer paper retracted 11 years after reported plagiarism

In November 2013, Elisabeth Bik reported five papers containing what she thought was “pretty obvious” plagiarized text in Karger’s Digestive Diseases to the journal’s editor in chief. 

Eleven years later, one of the bunch, “Inflammatory Bowel Disease as a Risk Factor for Colorectal Cancer,” has been retracted. 

The decision took “a ridiculously long time,” Bik said. “Perhaps they forgot to act, perhaps they lost my email, perhaps they thought it was too much trouble to check, or perhaps they were not sure what to do back in 2013, when I contacted them.” 

The recently retracted paper, by Milan Lukáš, a professor and head of the Clinical and Research Center for Intestinal Inflammation in Prague, has 81 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. About three-quarters of the citations came since 2013. 

“Following publication, concerns were raised to our attention that portions of the text in the article have been reproduced without appropriate attribution,” the retraction notice states. “Given the extent of the insufficiently attributed text reuse this article is being retracted.”

Lukáš “did not respond to requests to comment on the concerns within the given timeframe despite multiple attempts of contact,” according to the notice but he agreed with the retraction. 

Lukáš told Retraction Watch he is “disappointed,” because the article was written so long ago. He doesn’t understand the retraction, he said, but it’s a “decision I have to accept.”

The journal should not have taken more than a decade to retract it, Bik told Retraction Watch. 

Three of the five papers she reported in 2013 were retracted the following year. The remaining article, “Carcinogenesis in Inflammatory Bowel Disease” remains in the literature and has 55 citations since its publication in 2007. 

“It is strange how these five papers, all from the same journal, and all with very similar plagiarism concerns, were addressed so differently,” Bik said.

Gráinne McNamara, a research integrity manager for Karger, declined to comment on the investigation conducted after Bik’s initial report in 2013 citing staffing changes and limited access to archived communications from that period. Since then, “much has changed in research integrity at Karger.” 

McNamara said the concerns about Lukáš’ article and the other unretracted paper were brought to the attention of the publisher’s ethics team in 2023 and 2022 respectively, after Bik left comments on PubPeer. “The team, which was established in 2021, immediately opened an investigation for both cases of the overlap, following the relevant COPE flowchart,” McNamara said, referring to the Committee on Publication Ethics.

For the 2007 paper, Karger reviewed the concerns in context of the journal’s instructions on plagiarism when the article was published. Although the referencing in the paper is not in line with the current journal policy, McNamara said “we did not believe there was an intention to deceive a reader of the mini-review.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].