A professor in France who plagiarized extensively in a review article and then blamed the offense on an undisclosed medical writer will lose the publication.
“We have decided to retract this paper,” Yi-Xiang Wang, editor-in-chief of Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery, told by email. The move comes one day after a Retraction Watch exclusive describing how the professor, Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne, claimed he had not written the offending paper despite being listed as its first and corresponding author. Instead, Loffroy put the blame on an alleged medical writer.
Wang said he was looking into whether the paper, “Current role of multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging for prostate cancer,” had undergone a plagiarism check. He said the article’s speedy acceptance in just 14 days was “not common, but not very rare. Back in 2015, we have many invited papers, I assume that was an invited review, the review was done by editorial board members, this can be done in 7-10 days’ time.” But he chided Loffroy, who since 2017 has been deputy editor of the journal, for allegedly having others write his papers.
