Retraction of a manuscript

The manuscript “Measurement of tumor volume by PET to evaluate prognosis in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer treated by non-surgical therapy” was submitted to Acta Radiologica on November 3, 2010 and, after a review, accepted for publication on February 26, 2011 (1). The article was published in Acta Radiol 2011;52:646–50. Authors were: Honjiang Yan, Renben Wang (corresponding author), Fen Zhao, Kubli Zhu, Shumei Jiang, Wei Zhao, and Rui Feng, from the Department of Radiation Oncology and Department of Nuclear Medicine, Shandong Tumor Hospital, Jinan, China.

After the publication of this article, we have been made aware of a very similar publication originally published in Annals of Surgical Oncology (Chung MK, Jeong H-S, Son Y-I, et al. Prognostic value of metabolic tumor volume measured by 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography in patients with esophageal carcinoma. Ann Surg Oncol 2010;17:115–22) (2). After a detailed survey of the two articles a most likely plagiarism was detected. It is most likely that the authors of the article in Acta Radiologica wrote their manuscript based on the article in Ann Surg Oncol. More than half of the sentences are exactly identical to those in the article published in 2010, and there is no reference to the 2010 article. In particular, some numerical results data are identical, in spite of different subjects and cancer type.

After having confronted the corresponding author of the 2011 article in our journal, we received the following response: “We would like to apologize sincerely to readers, reviewers and editors for this serious error on our part and the article therefore should been withdrawn. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Based on our investigations and the statement from the corresponding author of (1), the article is hereby retracted.