A manuscript was submitted to our Journal in 2008. The six authors signed the author form for the Journal which accompanies all submitted manuscripts. The author form gives information on the role each author played in the study and states that each author has read and approved the paper for submission to the Journal.
Following peer-review the paper was accepted for publication. It was published in February 2009. In October 2009 the Journal received a letter from the corresponding author who asked for the paper to be retracted. The corresponding author stated that the first author had used data which was originally generated by a student working in the department (permission had been given to the first author to use the data) but that the data presented in the paper were different to the data published by the student in a thesis. The corresponding author further stated that the first author was being investigated by the university in which the research took place and by the Ministry of Education.
The Editor-in-Chief of the Journal and the Publisher wrote to the corresponding author and said that they would wait until the investigation by the university and Ministry of Education had concluded before deciding whether the paper should be retracted. The corresponding author responded to this letter and asked that the paper be retracted immediately and stated that the investigation would take several years.
The Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher then wrote to the first author and asked for a full and detailed explanation as to the concerns raised by the corresponding author. The first author responded and said that the dataset for the paper was extracted from a patient database which contains information on patients treated at the university. Datasets from several sources were used to update the main database and information was extracted based on the inclusion criteria outlined in the paper. The first author stated that she had identified more patients who fitted the inclusion criteria from the database than the student and this was the reason for the discrepancy in data between the thesis and the paper published in the Journal. The first author also told the Journal that the corresponding author had brought the discrepancies in the data to the attention of the Ministry of Education, the university's Academic Ethical Committee and the Faculty Appeals Committee. The first author says that these groups have accepted the reasons behind the discrepancies in the data.
The Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher also wrote to the co-authors of the paper (four co-authors, excluding the first author and the corresponding author). Three of the co-authors have responded and state that they accept the reasons behind the discrepancy in the data produced in the original project and the data used in the paper. In addition to writing to the co-authors, the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher informed the corresponding author that they were contacting the co-authors. The corresponding author responded and said that the paper should be retracted immediately and that he was considering whether to publicly announce that the paper should be retracted from the Journal.
The Journal would appreciate advice on how to proceed.
The Forum commented that it was unusual for an author to criticise his own paper. The Forum suggested asking the corresponding author to write a letter detailing his concerns that could be published in the journal and then his co-authors would have the chance to comment on the letter. Other advice was to contact the institution and ask them about their investigation and how long it will take to complete. The institution should be approached in neutral terms asking them to confirm the corresponding author’s claim that the investigation will take several years. The Forum believed that the editor is not in a position to do anything else at the moment.
Following the COPE meeting, we were informed by one of the authors involved in our case that an investigation had been launched to examine the allegations surrounding the data used in the paper. We wrote to the authors and asked for details of the investigation, particularly the contact details of the person chairing it. We received confirmation that the investigation is being coordinated by the research ethics committee of the university where the authors are based and have written to the chair of the committee and requested a report of their conclusions once the investigation has been completed. We have not yet heard back, although the letter was only sent recently. We have also let the authors know that we have contacted the research ethics committee and will wait on the findings of the investigation before proceeding any further.
Follow Up (December 2010):
The editor received no response from the authors' university and no response from the complainant (who was also a member of the author team). Therefore, the journal did not retract the paper and it continues to stand. The editor considers the case now closed.