In November 2013, Elisabeth Bik reported five papers containing what she thought was “pretty obvious” plagiarized text in Karger’s Digestive Diseases to the journal’s editor in chief.
Eleven years later, one of the bunch, “Inflammatory Bowel Disease as a Risk Factor for Colorectal Cancer,” has been retracted.
The decision took “a ridiculously long time,” Bik said. “Perhaps they forgot to act, perhaps they lost my email, perhaps they thought it was too much trouble to check, or perhaps they were not sure what to do back in 2013, when I contacted them.”
The recently retracted paper, by Milan Lukáš, a professor and head of the Clinical and Research Center for Intestinal Inflammation in Prague, has 81 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. About three-quarters of the citations came since 2013.
“Following publication, concerns were raised to our attention that portions of the text in the article have been reproduced without appropriate attribution,” the retraction notice states. “Given the extent of the insufficiently attributed text reuse this article is being retracted.”
Gráinne McNamara, a research integrity manager for Karger said the concerns about Lukáš’ article and the other unretracted paper were brought to the attention of the publisher’s ethics team in 2023 and 2022 respectively, after Bik left comments on PubPeer. “The team, which was established in 2021, immediately opened an investigation for both cases of the overlap, following the relevant COPE flowchart,” McNamara said, referring to the Committee on Publication Ethics.
