Int J Mol Med 14: 414–424, 2018; DOI: 10.3892/ijmm.2018.3590

An interested reader drew to our attention that the above study appeared to contain a high level of overlap with an article by the same authors published in the journal Drug Design, Development and Therapy [Kadivar A, Kamalidehghan B, Akbari Javar H, Karimi B, Sedghi R and Noordin MI: Antiproliferation effect of imatinib mesylate on MCF7, T-47D tumorigenic and MCF 10A nontumorigenic breast cell lines via PDGFR-β, PDGF-BB, c-Kit and SCF genes. Drug Des Devel Ther 11: 469-481, 2017]. Following an internal investigation and also in liaison with the authors, it was established that, although the studies were conducted along broadly similar lines, the papers contained entirely different data involving two different subsets of cell lines; the submission to Drug Des Devel Ther aimed to explore the effects of imatinib mesylate on three different groups, with each group being represented by a cell line, whereas the submission to Int J Mol Med explored the effectiveness of imatinib mesylate in breast cancer cell lines. In spite of this, considering the relatedness of the articles and the fact that the paper to Drug Des Devel Ther was submitted first and published while the Int J Mol Med paper was passing through the peer-review process, the authors concede that they should have properly referenced their paper submitted to Drug Des Devel Ther in the Int J Mol Med paper. Note that the publishers of Drug Des Devel Ther, with whom we were liaising, agreed with the decision to issue a Corrigendum for this paper that acknowledges the article published in Drug Des Devel Ther.

The authors regret their failure to acknowledge the related paper in this instance, and apologize to the readership for this oversight.