A cluster of papers by different authors has been retracted for sharing text, even though some papers were submitted at the same time.
How is that possible? A spokesperson for Springer told us that they have reason to believe a third-party company may have helped prepare the papers for publication, and in the process might have spread the material around to multiple manuscripts.
If you are wondering why we included this news story item in the Resource Library we did so because, though the analysis is far from clear cut, it does provide a cautionary warning for researchers considering using a third party service to help improve the chances their work will be published.
All papers conclude that a certain polymorphism could signal a risk for coronary artery disease among Chinese people.
We’ll start with the retraction notice for “Fibroblast growth factor receptor 4 polymorphisms and coronary artery disease: a case control study,” which cites the two papers that were retracted previously:
“The Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Biology Reports retracts the above-mentioned article per the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines on plagiarism. The article duplicates (copies) significant paragraphs from the following main source/sources…