British journal retracts article by Harvard author

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

A British medical journal said today it has retracted an article written by a Harvard doctor because it duplicates material previously published in another scientific journal by a different author.

Dr. Lee S. Simon's review of treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, which appeared in Best Practices & Research: Clinical Rheumatology in 2004, contained substantial portions from a 2003 article on the same topic in Expert Opinion: Drug Safety.

"This paper has been retracted," according to a statement issued by the Best Practice journal. "It included the reproduction of several sections of text and much of the reference list" from the earlier paper.

Reached this afternoon, Simon, a Harvard Medical School faculty member who is affiliated with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said he had no comment. Spokesmen for the medical school and the hospital said they are reviewing the matter.

"Currently we are looking into this matter," said David Cameron of Harvard.

Said Jerry Berger of Beth Israel Deaconess: "We are reviewing it, in strict accordance with the guidelines of and under the direction of Harvard Medical School, as we do with all questions surrounding academic issues."

The duplication came to light last week when researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center wrote a commentary in Nature about finding thousands of duplications when they scanned 7 million articles listed on Medline, an online database of biomedical scholarly publications. The Dallas Morning News reported that one of the instances involved Simon's paper and the earlier article by Dr. Roy Fleischmann, also of the University of Texas Southwestern.

The journal retracting Simon's article is published by Elsevier in England. The publishing company's US spokesman Tom Reller said on Friday that "Elsevier takes concerns about plagiarism and ethical misconduct in publishing very seriously."

Simon, an expert on arthritis medications, evaluated painkillers, including cox-2 inhibitors, for the US Food and Drug Administration in 2002 and 2003. Vioxx, one of the drugs in this class promoted as easier on the stomach, was removed from the market in 2004 after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart disease and stroke.