A 2022 paper in Cureus on causes of cancer around the world is under investigation by the journal following inquiries by Retraction Watch prompted by a reader’s email.
The paper, “Causes of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors,” shares a title and figures with a 2005 paper in The Lancet. It also “follows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,” an anonymous tipster told us.
As we’ve noted elsewhere in a report on the team that developed the phrase, “Tortured phrases are what happens to words that get translated from English into a foreign language, then back to English — perhaps by a computer trying to generate a scholarly publication for a group of unscrupulous authors.”
Graham Parker, Cureus’ director of publishing and customer success, told us to his knowledge, “the journal has not been contacted with any concerns regarding this article. Now that we are aware of a concern, we will examine both articles in question to see if any action is required.”
Neither Khizer K. Ansari, the corresponding author of the Cureus paper and a student at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in Wardha, India, nor Majid Ezzati, the corresponding author of the article in The Lancet and a professor at Imperial College London, responded to requests for comment.
