When the bioinformatist Sam Payne was asked to check a manuscript on a topic that is relevant for his work, he agreed - not in the expectation of how relevant it would be.

The manuscript that Payne was sent in March dealt with a study on the effect of Cell sizes for protein analyzes . "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 earlier, but the most noticeable were the diagram Of this, it was identical to the last data point. He sent an email to the magazine Biosystems , which promptly rejected the manuscript.

in July, Payne discovered that the manuscript was published in the journal Proteomics , and informed the editors. On August 15, the journal withdrew the paper. In an accompanying explanation, "a significant overlap between the illustrations" was quoted in paper and Payne's work. At the request of Nature , a spokesman for Wiley confirmed Proteomics that "this paper was submitted to several magazines and contained plagued images".

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