Nagata T, Setoguchi S, Hemenway D, Perry MJ. Effectiveness of a law to reduce alcohol-impaired driving in Japan. Inj Prev 2008;14:19–23.

This article includes duplication of text from sections of a previous manuscript by three of the same authors published in the Japan Medical Association Journal.¹

The paper published in Injury Prevention was submitted in July 2005. During the process of peer review and revision, an early draft was also submitted to the JMAJ and published there in December 2006. That paper used a before and after design to assess the impact of changes to an alcohol-impaired driving law. The version ultimately published in Injury Prevention looked at the effect of the same law but included a longer period of observation and a more sophisticated time series analysis.

Dr Setoguchi was only involved with the time series analyses published in Injury Prevention and was not involved with the manuscript published in JMAJ.

Because of these substantial differences, the editors believe that this does not represent duplicate publication of data. However, portions of text from the background and discussion section of the JMAJ publication are also found in the Injury Prevention paper. In addition, the submission to Injury Prevention does not cite or acknowledge the JMAJ manuscript.

A corrected pdf version of the Injury Prevention paper is published online (linked to the original version http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/vol14/issue1). The authors apologise to the readers of Injury Prevention for this oversight and for any confusion it might create.

T Nagata, S Setoguchi, D Hemenway, M J Perry

REFERENCE

1. Nagata T, Hemenway D, Perry MJ. The effectiveness of a new law to reduce alcohol impaired driving in Japan. Japan Medical Association Journal 2006;49:365–9.