Two recently retracted papers in the Journal of Neurosurgery (JNS) point to the dangers of trying to guess what amount of overlap the publication is willing to tolerate.
Two papers published in JNS in 2010 and 2013 dealing with stem cells in bone marrow and the sciatic nerve have been retracted after accusations of plagiarism and overlap were made to the publication.
According to our friends at Retraction Watch (www.retractionwatch.com), the first retracted paper, “The effect of exercise on mobilization of hematopoietic progenitor cells involved in the repair of sciatic nerve crush injury.” (J Neurosurg 118:594–605, by Cheng FC, Sheu ML, Su HL, Chen YJ, Chen CJ, Chiu WT, Sheehan J, Pan HC), was published in 2013.
Some of the text in the Introduction and Methods sections overlapped with a 2009 paper in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications that was written by four of the same authors (including Pan, listed as first author).
The authors said they retract the paper “in response to accusations that it contains materials that constitute plagiarism, duplicate publication, and copyright infringement.” Retraction Watch reported the paper showed similarities to figures in a second JNS retraction, a 2010 paper which shares five of the same authors, and lists Hung-Chuan Pan as the corresponding author.
Pan, of Taichung Veterans General Hospital, had contacted the journal about publishing an erratum for one of the articles when the journal was tipped off by an email pointing out deeper problems in the two retracted papers.
The second retracted paper is “Enhancement of regeneration with glia cell line–derived neurotrophic factor–transduced human amniotic fluid mesenchymal stem cells after sciatic nerve crush injury” by Fu-Chou Cheng, Ph.D., Ming-Hong Tai, Ph.D., Meei-Ling Sheu, Ph.D., Chun-Jung Chen, Ph.D., Dar-Yu Yang, M.D., Ph.D., Hong-Lin Su, Ph.D., Shu-Peng Ho, Ph.D., Shu-Zhen Lai, B.S., and Hung-Chuan Pan, M.D., Ph.D., was published in 2010.
According to Retraction Watch, “Along with similarities to the other 2013 JNS paper, portions of the text were ‘nearly identical’ to parts of a 2001 article in Brain Research and a 2008 article in European Urology. Neither paper shares any authors with the retracted study. Some of figure panels and text also overlap with a 2009 article in the Journal of Biomedical Science, which was co-authored by six of the authors from the retracted paper (and lists Pan as first author).”
iThenticate
The authors said they used iThenticate, an anti-plagiarism program to ensure that their manuscript would have less than 30% overlap with previous papers. They believed that this was sufficient.
Retraction Watch asked Jo Ann Eliason, the communications manager at the JNS Publishing Group about the 30% overlap threshold. Eliason said, “We do not know why the authors believed that ‘less than 30 percent overlap with other papers’ is sufficient. We state on our submission site that we use iThenticate to point out overlap between submitted papers and previously published papers. We have no published policy on what percent of overlap is ‘safe.’ Internally, we have our own ‘red flag’ to indicate what papers should be evaluated more thoroughly, but we do not publicize what this red flag is.”
