When bioinformatician Sam Payne was asked to review a manuscript on a topic relevant to his work, he agreed - not expecting how relevant it would be.

The manuscript sent to Payne in March covered a study on the impact of Cell sample sizes for protein analysis. “I recognized it immediately,” says Payne, who works at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The text, he says, resembled that of a paper 1, which he had written three years earlier, but what was most striking were the charts: some of them were identical down to the last data point. He sent an email to the magazineBioSystems, who promptly rejected the manuscript.

In July, Payne discovered that the manuscript was in the journalProteomicshad been published and informed the editors. On August 15, the Journal retracted the paper. An accompanying statement cited "a significant uncited overlap between the figures" in the paper and Payne's work. Upon request fromNaturea Wiley spokesperson confirmedProteomicspublished that “this paper was submitted to multiple journals simultaneously and contained plagiarized images.”

…further text content…