A journal retracted a 2004 paper this week that was among the 70,000 papers flagged last week as potentially containing plagiarized material.

Last week's report, published in Nature, presented findings from a new text-search program that scanned medical literature for duplicate publication. The retracted paper was one of 70 that the researchers noted as highly suspicious.

The journal Best Practices & Research: Clinical Rheumatology, said in a statement to the Boston Globe that it had retracted a 2004 paper by Lee S. Simon that reviewed treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, which contained text from a 2003 article in Expert Opinion: Drug Safety by Roy Fleischmann at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

Simon declined to comment to the Globe, and spokespeople for Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where Simon is based, said they were investigating.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the authors of the Nature report contacted the journals and authors of the 70 papers they believed were highly suspect, and the retraction "appears to be the first result of their sleuthing."