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Case

COPE Members bring specific (anonymised) publication ethics issues to the COPE Forum for discussion and advice. The advice from the COPE Forum meetings is specific to the particular case under consideration and may not necessarily be applicable to similar cases either past or future. The advice is given by the Forum participants (COPE Council and COPE Members from across all regions and disciplines).

COPE Members may submit a case for consideration.

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Showing 381–400 of 780 results
  • Case

    Self-plagiarism?

    A paper was published with four authors from two universities and the contact author provided an exclusive license form on behalf of all of the authors. After publication, one of the authors contacted the editor claiming a case of plagiarism. The claim is that the published paper was a direct copy of an MSc thesis which this person had supervised 7 years previously. Complications arise in that…
  • Case

    What constitutes authorship?

    Author X submitted a paper to another journal, and included author Y, a student in the same institute, as a courtesy. Author Y had drawn two figures for the paper and discussed some of the observations (all made by author X) with author X but the paper did not deal with the thesis research of author Y. After the original paper was returned, requiring extensive revisions, author X revised…
  • Case

    Parallels between unpublished manuscript and a published article from other authors

    I am seeking advice on a confidential ‘letter of concern’ from an author (X) of a manuscript submitted before I was appointed editor of the journal but rejected by me on the advice of the associate editor. Author X is concerned with similarities or parallels between his manuscript, rejected in 2008, and a recently published article. I have looked over our file and contacted the associate…
  • Case

    Possible dual publication

    As editor of journal A I am handling a manuscript by an author and it is likely to be accepted, although this is not yet decided. As a reviewer for journal B, I have since been asked to review a manuscript by the same author that uses similar material and comes to a similar conclusion, but pushes the presentation of the results a little further. My gut feeling is that there is insufficient nove…
  • Case
    On-going

    Conflicting claims of intellectual property?

    Dr R, of University 1, has written an ‘official complain’ to Editor E alleging that a paper he was invited to review employs without permission a method that is the ‘background intellectual property’ (BIP) of University 1. He believes the paper should not be published. Dr R asserts that he created the BIP prior to its use in several research projects at University 1, and notes that Dr A,…
  • Case

    Case of duplicate publication detected after 9 years

    An original research article was published in a journal in 2000. This is a quarterly, non-indexed journal. The abstract is available on a national indexation website. The same article with a slight change in the title was published in our journal in April 2002. Ours is a monthly journal which has been indexed in Medline since 1975. Both articles appear the same, with the study of…
  • Case

    Retraction or expression of concern?

    Shortly after publishing a short report, another group involved in similar work accused one of the authors (A) of the short report of fabricating and/or stealing data from their lab. The other group also stated that author A’s conclusions about an image published in the short report were wrong. We asked to see author A’s original data and talked to his co-authors and the institution wher…
  • Case
    On-going

    Concerns over research by an author in numerous, separate publications

    The authenticity of the content of numerous publications by Author K has been questioned by ‘concerned researchers’ in an anonymous email sent to the Editor of Journal A in December 2009. The email noted that author K had been publishing articles in numerous journals that “report remarkable findings that watching humorous films, drinking deep-sea water, exposure to road traffic, cell-pho…
  • Case

    Dispute over authorship and usage of research protocol

    In November 2009, the Editor of Journal X received a letter complaining of a serious breach of publication ethics regarding an article already published a month earlier on the Journal’s website. The paper concerned had not yet been published in a full journal issue either online or in print. One of the authors of the letter, Professor X, was a named author on the published paper. His complaint…
  • Case

    Author dispute over data presented in paper

    A manuscript was submitted to our Journal in 2008. The six authors signed the author form for the Journal which accompanies all submitted manuscripts. The author form gives information on the role each author played in the study and states that each author has read and approved the paper for submission to the Journal. Following peer-review the paper was accepted for publication. It was p…
  • Case

    A case of child abuse

    Child abuse is a common but underdiagnosed problem in our country. The abuse ranges from minor injury to severe head trauma. The true incidence of intentional head injury in children remains uncertain. We published a case of child abuse with blunt head trauma with intracranial haemorrhage presenting as loss of consciousness simulating a diabetic ketoacidosis. We received a complaint from…
  • Case

    Falsification of certificates of deposit of new bacterial species in culture collections

    The process of naming and describing novel species of bacteria is governed by the Bacteriological Code. As part of this process, authors are required to deposit the type strain of the novel species in at least two culture collections located in different countries, and they are also required to provide documentary evidence that the strains have been so deposited and that the deposited strains a…
  • Case

    Publisher and stakeholder with misaligned conflict of interest policies

    We have recently developed and begun to put into practice a policy on collection and declaration of conflicts of interest statements from any individual involved in contributing to or reviewing our pathways. This policy includes members of our editorial team, and contributor and reviewer members from our stakeholder groups. We have devised a standard form to collect these statements in a unifor…
  • Case

    Ethics committee waives consent for case report, editor disagrees

    The authors wish to publish a case report that aims to characterise complex chromosomal abnormalities in a rare congenital syndrome. It describes, in detail, the clinical features of two newborn infants. When asked about consent to publish, the authors said they did not obtain it because the data were reported from existing clinical diagnostic test results and therefore did not constitute a sys…
  • Case

    Homeoprophylactic treatment of a zoonotic disease

    This research article investigated the effect of the widespread administration of a homeoprophylactic preparation against a bacterial zoonotic disease in a developing country after a period of particularly heavy rainfall. The authors claim to have given this oral preparation to all members of the population over 1 year of age, in three provinces of the country where this disease is prevalent (o…
  • Case

    What involvement should a journal have in a dispute about an article published in the journal?

    Our journal published a manuscript as part of an editors’ forum which, as an invited forum paper, received reviewer feedback but did not follow our usual double-blind peer review standard for regular submissions (the reviewers were aware of the author’s identity but the author did not know the identity of the reviewers). Following the publication of this article, the editor-in-chief rece…
  • Case

    Plagiarism, double submission and reviewer ethicality

    This is a complicated case which involves possible plagiarism, double submission and reviewer misconduct. The timeline is as follows:  In year n, a paper P1 authored by A1 and A2 was published in the English language journal X. The paper describes a theoretical analysis of a particular phenomenon. In year n+6, paper P2 was published in a non-English language outlet by auth…
  • Case

    Scientist reads published paper by former collaborators and claims co-authorship

    The case concerns a paper we published, ahead of print, on the journal’s website on 5 October 2009. A week later we received a letter from Dr A who claimed that the authors had a major conflict of interest and implied that she should have been listed as an author. The paper we published is based on an idea which was tested in 2002 in Country P, and in 2004 in Countries Q and R. The authors of t…
  • Case

    Deception in submitting manuscript for publication

    A manuscript was submitted to my journal. The author, on his own accord, submitted the manuscript for review to several reviewers under the guise that this was sent by me. The author sent the following explanation: “In some of our previous encounters, you have indicated that finding sufficient cooperative reviewers has been a problem for you. In order to provide you with some help in thi…
  • Case

    Self plagiarism

    On initial assessment of a submitted review paper with a single author, the editor checked some of the references to the author’s own work that were cited in the paper. The author mentioned in the covering letter that he had written extensively on some of the specific themes of the paper, as the references made clear, but he claimed that the paper was an original synthesis of the material.…

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