WIKIMEDIA, FRANCESCO MIRALLES GALUPIn July, Michael Sarr, an editor of the journal Surgery, received an e-mail from an unknown tipster named Clare Francis, alerting him that material from a 2004 paper published in his journal might have previously appeared in Oncogene. “If this was dual publication, we would retract our article and the author would be censored,” said Sarr, who is also a professor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “You bet we looked into it.”
Sarr spoke with the paper’s authors and read both manuscripts carefully. He determined that the “titles looked similar, but they were totally different experiments.” The experience frustrated him. It took Sarr several hours to investigate the claim, and he felt that Francis had accused researchers of fraud without doing enough digging of her own. In an e-mail exchange with Francis, Sarr alleged that she had wasted his time. “Quite frankly, in the future, unless you wish to point out how these articles are exactly the same and unless you do your research, we (at Surgery) are going to ignore any further claims that you send us,” he wrote.
Francis—whose real identity, gender, and occupation remain secret—is notorious among journal editors as a relentless whistleblower. However, ...
