Luiz Eduardo Imbelloni, professor of anesthesiology at the Nova Esperança School of Medicine, in Paraíba, was informed in May 2013 by reader Aman Kumar that one of his papers had been plagiarized by researchers in China, who published the same results in a German periodical. “Everything I had described, right down to the numerical data, had been copied verbatim,” says Imbelloni, who reported the case. In 2010, he and some colleagues published an article in English on the application of a local anesthesia called rachianesthesia during a surgical procedure that generally requires general anesthesia; it came out in the Revista Brasileira de Anestesiologia, which is published by the Brazilian Society of Anesthesiology, and it also appeared in open-access format on the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) database. The following year, a group of researchers led by X. Liu, of PLA Hospital, in China, published an article in the German journal Der Anaesthesist that rather surprisingly presented the same findings, data, and conclusions as the Brazilians’. “They didn’t even bother to change the number of patients that we studied – 68,” says Imbelloni. At the end of 2013, Der Anaesthesist officially disqualified the article signed by the Chinese.
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