Chemosphere 68 (2007) 1397

I have handled the accusation of Prof. Karen Johannesson,
since I was not involved in the former review process
of the manuscript and therefore independent. This severe
accusation was sent to the responsible author of the manuscript
published in Chemosphere, Dr. S.M. Ding, for a
comment. Simultaneously, all points were checked by me
in detail. Finally, the whole case was sent to the members
of the editorial board and the co-editors of the environmental
chemistry section for comments. Based on their reply
and the detailed evaluation, the following conclusions
were drawn:
• The reaction of Prof. K. Johannesson was very clear in
her review to Environmental Science and Technology
and should have given the authors a clear warning about
their doing.
• After some modifications, the manuscript was submitted
to Chemosphere with the comment: ‘‘Please do not let
Dr. Johannesson (Department of Geology, the University
of Texas at Arlington, Box 19049, 500 Yates Street,
Arlington, TX 76019-0049, USA) to review our manuscript
because the conclusions in the manuscript are contradictory
to his.’’ This reason could not be verified by
comparing both manuscripts.

The accusations of Prof. K. Johannesson could be confirmed.
I acknowledged and accepted a letter of apology
from Dr. S.M. Ding who assigned himself as main
responsible for the plagiarism. Nevertheless, the behaviour
of the authors was considered as severe by the editors
and those replying from the editorial board.
Therefore, it was agreed to retract the manuscript from
Chemosphere.
The lessons to be learned, I will leave to the reader. Nevertheless,
even if true, language problems are no reason and
justification to copy text. Moreover, it is unacceptable to
take over equations and data sets without clearly defining
their origin.
Editor
Michael Oehme
Department of Chemistry,
University of Basel,
St. Johanns-Ring 19,
CH 4056 Basel, Switzerland
Tel.: +41 61 267 11 12; fax: +41 61 267 09 76
E-mail address: Michael.Oehme@unibas.ch
Available online 19 April 2007