A British medical journal said yesterday 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 Practice & Research Clinical Rheumatology in 2004, contained substantial portions from a 2003 article on the same topic in Expert Opinion on Drug Safety, the Best Practice journal said.
"This paper has been retracted," according to a statement issued by the Best Practice journal.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.
Simon, a Harvard Medical School faculty member who practices at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said he had no comment. Spokesmen for the medical school and the hospital said they are reviewing the matter.
The alleged 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
The publishing company's US spokesman, Tom Reller, did not comment yesterday but said on Friday that "Elsevier takes concerns about plagiarism and ethical misconduct in publishing very seriously."
Simon, a specialist on arthritis medications, evaluated painkillers, including cox-2 inhibitors, for the US Food and Drug Administration in 2002 and 2003.
