Journal investigating duplication allegation against Boston researcher

The publisher of a medical journal told the Globe today it would investigate allegations that a paper written by a Harvard scientist duplicated large sections of a research paper by another author.

The Harvard rheumatologist is among the scientific authors named by Texas researchers who report finding 200,000 instances of duplication in papers published by scientific journals, the Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday.

Dr. Lee Simon of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is named in the newspaper story describing a project at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center that scanned abstracts of articles listed on Medline, an online database of biomedical scholarly publications. The work is the subject of a commentary in the current issue of Nature.

A paper by Simon published in 2004 in Best Practices and Research: Clinical Rheumatology was flagged by software programmed to spot duplication. According to the results, the article reviewing the medical literature on drug treatments for rheumatoid arthritis contained about 55 percent of the text in a paper by UT researcher Roy Fleischmann that was published in 2003 in the journal Expert Opinion: Drug Safety.

Simon, reached by telephone this morning, said he had no comment on the Dallas newspaper story, adding “I am leaving this to a discussion between the two journals.”

Beth Israel Deaconess spokesman Jerry Berger said any investigation would be handled by Harvard Medical School. The medical school, which found out about the allegation today, is going to look into it, spokesman Don Gibbons said.

Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, the publisher of the journal in which Simon’s article appeared, said by e-mail: "Elsevier takes concerns about plagiarism and ethical misconduct in publishing very seriously and we are currently investigating this matter in accordance with our usual procedures."