A review article written by a rheumatologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, has been retracted after the journal, Best Practice & Research Clinical Rheumatology, learned that more than half of the paper may have been plagiarized.

The 2004 article, by Lee Simon (Best Pract. Res. Clin. Rheumatol. 18, 507?538; 2004), was manually checked after surfacing in an automated trawl through 7 million biomedical abstracts for possible plagiarism (see Nature 451, 397?399 ; 2008). The retraction was announced on 29 January.

Harvard Medical School has formed a committee to review the matter but has not launched an official investigation, says spokesman David Cameron. Simon declined to comment, saying only: ?I'm very sorry that I've been so targeted for something like a review article.?