An Indian publisher, Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers, said on Tuesday that it had withdrawn a medical textbook after an editor of Wikipedia wrote to say that a section had been plagiarized from the Wikipedia article on H.I.V.
The textbook, “Understanding and Management of Special Child in Pediatric Dentistry,” reprinted verbatim a long passage from Wikipedia about the transmission of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, via blood products. Written by Priya Verma Gupta and Amitha M. Hegde, the book was published in March 2012. The editor who noticed the copied passage, Dr. James Heilman, found and linked to an identical version from Wikipedia December 2010.
In a statement addressed to Dr. Heilman, an emergency-room doctor from Cranbrook, British Columbia, and The Times, Tarun Duneja, the director of publishing at Jaypee Brothers, said: “We have taken the matter up with the editors of the book and the contributors to the chapter in question. We take care to ensure the veracity of texts, but in this case our systems appear to have failed. However, we have decided to permanently withdraw the book from sale, and we will remove the title from our Web site and recall the book from our wholesalers and distributors.”
Chatting via instant message, Dr. Heilman said that he was editing the H.I.V. article as part of a project to improve and then simplify 80 of the most important medical articles. The articles are being prepared so they can be translated — with the help of Translators Without Borders — into as many languages as possible, particularly in the developing world.
He said that he had been looking for citations “to support a poorly supported passage and came across a recent medical text on Google Books that supported what we had very well.” Pausing for effect, he said that he “noticed it supported it a little too well,” adding that the “whole thing was exactly like the article and was published years after us.”
It was not lost on Dr. Heilman that the copying indicated a sign of respect for the quality of Wikipedia’s medical articles: “We do not mind if people publish our work. They do not even have to ask our permission, and they can try to make a profit off of it. They, however, cannot claim it as their own, and they must give us just a little bit of credit.”
An earlier version of this post misstated the Wikipedia article that was reprinted, in part, in a medical textbook. It was the article on H.I.V., not AIDS.