http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/324/5930/1004

Notzon's journal was alerted to such a case by Déjà vu. A group in China had, by Déjà vu's estimate, copied more than 95% of a paper on breast cancer first published in 2003 in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics. The Chinese group changed the focus from breast cancer to nasopharyngeal cancer, which is much more common in those of Asian ancestry, and reported data from their own patients. The lead author of the original paper, Odilia Popanda of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, notes that she was rather miffed that the Chinese work, published in 2005, appeared in a higher profile journal, Clinical Cancer Research.

The first author of the Clinical Cancer Research paper, Wei-dong Wang, an oncologist at Xinqiao Hospital in Chongqing, China, wrote in an e-mail message to Science that "our English skill was not good enough to meet the language requirements" of Clinical Cancer Research. "To publish our findings as quickly as possible, the first author Dr. Wang organized our results in the similar pattern of Popanda's publication," Wei-dong Wang continued, referring to himself in the message. He stressed, however, that the type of cancer and the results were different.

Wang also wrote that "we have done foolish things" and "we should express our findings in our own words." Wang wrote in a later e-mail message to Science that he and his co-authors had decided to withdraw the paper, and it was retracted late last month.

Wang's account of patchwriting jibes with what Notzon has seen in her classes. She was startled to find that many foreign scholars at M. D. Anderson, particularly those from Asia, consider it perfectly appropriate. "We had a young woman visiting from China who taught writing and editing in China, and she said laughingly, ‘Oh, we encourage this sort of thing because people don't have good idiomatic English.’" But, Notzon says, patchwriting is "wrong because it's really a kind of plagiarism—they're taking someone else's research idea."