With the increasingly hectic pace of modern life, everybody is always on the look out for time-saving tricks and tips.
Scientists at the National University of Singapore and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University certainly found one, but we really can’t recommend it: doing one randomized controlled trial (RCT) with several outcomes, and publishing them as three separate 2014 papers with “considerable overlap.”
So far, one paper has been retracted, and another withdrawn.
The Wiley joint Journal of Advanced Nursing, home to the retracted paper, gave us a play-by-play on what happened:
This was a case of duplication (which always has elements of redundancy and plagiarism (self)/data re-cycling and copyright issues in it) and it was discovered by someone who was doing a systematic review and [noted] three very similar papers; the CONSORT diagram was the same in each and also the demographic table. What they had done was an RCT with more than one outcome and published all the outcomes separately. They came clean and quietly about it.
According to the retraction notice, these are the papers:
- Effects of a transtheoretical model–based exercise stage–matched intervention on exercise behaviour and quality of life in patients with coronary heart disease: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Advanced Nursing
- Effect of a transtheoretical model-based stage-matched exercise intervention on exercise behavior and angina in patients with coronary heart disease: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing
- The effects of a transtheoretical model-based exercise stage-matched intervention on exercise behavior in patients with coronary heart disease: A randomized controlled trial. Patient Education and Counseling
We reached out to the authors and other journals that published the papers to find out what their plan is. We haven’t heard from Patient Education and Counseling, but Barbara Riegel, editor of the Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, got back to us right away:
We are most definitely aware of this issue! We have done a full investigation and had numerous email exchanges with the authors. We chose not to publish the article in question (although it had already been published on-line so we took it off-line). Very concerning issue!
Here’s the notice for “Effects of a transtheoretical model–based exercise stage–matched intervention on exercise behaviour and quality of life in patients with coronary heart disease: a randomized controlled trial”:
The above article from Journal of Advanced Nursing, published online on 26th June 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor-in-Chief and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to considerable overlap with the following papers:
Zhu L.-X., Ho S.-C., Sit J.W.H., He H.-G. (2014) Effect of a transtheoretical model-based stage-matched exercise intervention on exercise behavior and angina in patients with coronary heart disease: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing DOI:10.1097/JCN.0000000000000162.
Zhu L.-X., Ho S.-C., Sit J.W.H., He H.-G. (2014) The effects of a transtheoretical model-based exercise stage-matched intervention on exercise behavior in patients with coronary heart disease: A randomized controlled trial. Patient Education and Counseling 95, 384–392.
Reference
Zhu L-X., Ho S-C., Sit J.W.H. & He H-G. (2014) Effects of a transtheoretical model–based exercise stage–matched intervention on exercise behaviour and quality of life in patients with coronary heart disease: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Advanced Nursing. doi:10.1111/jan.12469