Britain's most ubiquitous psychiatrist was yesterday at the centre of a plagiarism row after it emerged that substantial portions of an article he had written for a medical journal were copied from the work of an American academic.

The article written by Raj Persaud in the February edition of Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry was withdrawn and a retraction printed, but it went unnoticed outside the mental health community. One of the youngest doctors to become a consultant at the highly respected Maudsley teaching hospital in London, and boasting eight degrees, Dr Persaud writes on mental health matters in a string of publications and has presented the Radio 4 psychology programme All in the Mind.

The alleged plagiarism came to light when Thomas Blass, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, happened upon Dr Persaud's article. The piece, entitled "Why The Media Refuses To Obey," was about the social psychologist Stanley Milgram, famous for his 1963 "obedience" experiments, when people were encouraged to "electrocute" peers as punishment for a mistake.

Professor Blass has written a book and numerous articles on Milgram. He said he was shocked by the similarity between Dr Persaud's piece and his work. "I am reading it [Dr Persaud's piece] and all of my words are echoing back at me," he told the Guardian. "He had taken paragraphs from my work, word for word. Over 50% of his piece was my work, which I have spent more than 10 years researching. I felt outrage, disbelief and incredulity this could happen, that a person who is himself a writer could do this. It's very disconcerting."

…Yesterday Prof Blass said he earlier complained over another Milgram article by Dr Persaud in the TES which appeared to borrow heavily from the American's work: "I communicated directly with [Persaud] and pointed out as much of half of his article came verbatim from me. In his response, he said he didn't see the final version before it goes to press, and said the subeditors must have taken out the quotation marks and citation at the bottom." Dr Persaud then offered "as reparation" to give Prof Blass necessary credit "in the very next column" and would also apologise for the omission.

Though a reference to Prof Blass's book on Milgram was added to the article's web version, an apology never appeared in any of Dr Persaud's subsequent writings for the TES. When asked why this was, Dr Persaud said: "I offered an apology, but didn't receive a response from Blass so assumed he was happy with the website reference. If he had come back asking for an apology, I would have definitely given one."