Andrew J.S. Coats
Abstract
On the 6th December 2008, in my role as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Cardiology, I received an email from Professor Harold Garner of UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. Professor Garner told me that using a new search engine methodology (eTBLAST) he and colleagues had identified a paper in the International Journal of Cardiology published in 1996 which had remarkable text and data similarity to an earlier paper published in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine. They had detected this similarity after randomly selecting citations from Medline and submitting them to the tool to find other highly similar citations as part of their NIH/R01 funded research on the ethics of publication. We have been notified that all such cases are reported in a database, Déjà Vu (
http://spore.swmed.edu/dejavu/). We investigated the text of the two papers and we agreed that there was such a similarity that the later paper must have plagiarized the earlier paper, and in doing so infringed the copyright. In accordance with our previously published standards on ethical publishing in the Journal we hereby retract the paper “The prognostic value of serum troponin T in unstable angina. Gökhan Cin V, Gök H, Kaptanoğlu B. Int J Cardiol. 1996 Mar;53(3):237–44.”.
Keywords: Scientific fraud; Plagiarism; Retraction
On the 6th December 2008, in my role as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Cardiology, I received an email from Professor Harold Garner of UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. Professor Garner told me that using a new search engine methodology (eTBLAST) he and colleagues had identified a paper in the International Journal of Cardiology published in 1996 [1] V. Gökhan Cin, H. Gök and B. Kaptanoğlu, The prognostic value of serum troponin T in unstable angina, Int J Cardiol 53 (3) (Mar 1996), pp. 237–244.[1] which had remarkable text and data similarity to an earlier paper published in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine [2]. They had detected this similarity after randomly selecting citations from Medline and submitting them to the tool to find other highly similar citations as part of their NIH/R01 funded research on the ethics of publication. We have been notified that all such cases are reported in a database, Déjà Vu(http://spore.swmed.edu/dejavu/). We investigated the text of the two papers and we agreed that there was such a similarity that the later paper must have plagiarized the earlier paper, and in doing so infringed the copyright. In accordance with our previously published standards on ethical publishing in the Journal [3] we hereby retract the later paper. We reiterate our policy of zero-tolerance of such scientific fraud. Unfortunately the retracted paper had been published in 1996 before the present editorial team had been appointed and we do not have the source material relating to its original submission, and the editor-in-chief of the time has unfortunately died. The authors of the retracted papers have published nothing else in the International Journal of Cardiology, but a review of Pubmed shows that the first author has published one other paper in 2004, a case report in Circulation Journal, and the second and third authors many other papers in recent years. The publication of papers containing scientific fraud and plagiarized material is unfortunately not uncommon and we all have a duty to ensure this fraud is detected and reported to assist in deterring future occurrences.
Acknowledgement
The authors of this manuscript have certified that they comply with the Principles of Ethical Publishing in the International Journal of Cardiology [3].
References
[1] V. Gökhan Cin, H. Gök and B. Kaptanoğlu, The prognostic value of serum troponin T in unstable angina, Int J Cardiol 53 (3) (Mar 1996), pp. 237–244.
[2] C.W. Hamm, J. Ravkilde and W. Gerhardt et al., The prognostic value of serum troponin T in unstable angina, N Engl J Med 327 (3) (>Jul 16 1992), pp. 146–150. View Record in Scopus
Cited By in Scopus (646)
[3] A.J. Coats, Ethical authorship and publishing, Int J Cardiol (131) (2009), pp. 149–150.
