How to request retraction of a published paper when contacting the editors and publishers doesn't work? About 18 months ago, I found a published paper which plagiarised my work.

I initially contacted the journal editors, but they did not respond. I then contacted Elsevier, which publishes the journal. After a series of emails over several months I was forwarded a fairly cold response from an editor, which denied the issue with little apparent investigation (even though I had already presented detailed evidence of the plagiarised sections). I eventually contacted one of the authors who readily admitted the problem (the authors had previously attempted to plagiarise my work, but I caught this early because I was invited to peer-review that paper). The authors offered to request that the paper is retracted. However, I suspect that the authors have experienced the same issue I faced when trying to request action from the editors, and the paper is still available in published form online.

How should I proceed to deal with this situation? I have already tried contacting the journal editors and Elsevier via the "Contact us" link (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/contactus), but this has been a waste of time.

This is not a well-respected journal within my field of work, so I could try to ignore it. But, as well as the obvious reasons why the paper should be retracted, it has already received a citation - which potentially could have been attributed to one of my original publications.
If you have tried the journal/publisher's complaint process without success, and you believe that the journal editors are not handling the matter according to commonly accepted publication ethics standards, you can contact COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics. All Elsevier journals are members of COPE.


  If a reader or an author has concerns about a member editor, journal or publisher which they wish to raise to the attention of COPE, they should email  the COPE Membership Assistant and supply the following information:
  
  
  A summary of the concerns in 500 words—this will be shared with the editor and/or publisher and thus the summary should be as clear as possible and provided in a polite tone.
  An outline of the points within the COPE Code of Conduct which are relevant to the concerns.
  


Source: COPE: Contact Us 

This flowchart explains how COPE handles complaints about member journals.