FLICKR, FEATHEREDTARA review article charting the progress of genome-wide association studies in domestic animals has been retracted because its authors plagiarized other sources, reported Retraction Watch. The article, written by Hui Li and colleagues at the China’s Ministry of Agriculture and the Northeast Agricultural University and published in the Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology, was found to contain “substantial textual overlap with previously published studies,” including a 2010 article in PLOS Genetics.
Writing at Retraction Watch, Adam Marcus pointed out that, “[f]inding passages of ‘textual overlap’ isn’t difficult manually—and would have been even easier with detection software, which makes us wonder whether any such screening occurred.” He also said that in several cases, the authors did reference the previously published article, but not until at least one sentence after the plagiarized text. “[W]hile not making what the researchers did right,” Marcus wrote, “[this] indicates that they may not have understood it to be plagiarism since, at least in the instances we observed, they did cite their sources.”
