2004

An editor received a paper and requested details of ethical approval from the authors. The authors replied that they had approached the ethics committee about carrying out a more extensive study than the one submitted, for which ethical approval was denied or possibly thought unnecessary - the authors’ English isn’t clear in their responses. Before the start of the more extensive study, the authors planned a hypothesis generating study involving interviewing recently bereaved relatives.

A paper was submitted which reported a study of observing people with severe learning disabilities and their interactions with staff on a locked hospital ward. The journal was keen to consider the paper further, but had concerns about ethical approval. The authors stated in their cover letter that ‘Ethical approval was sought from the Research Ethics Committee, but the Committee deemed that the research 'can go ahead without the need for Ethical approval'.

The authors submitted a paper to journal A on genetic analysis of a potentially pathogenic organism isolated from children, analysed by school attended. Six days later, the same authors submitted a paper to journal B on genetic analysis of the same organism isolated from children, analysed by socio-economic class. The papers appear to be different analyses of the same data, and substantial portions of the texts of the two manuscripts are identical.

In January 2004 a submission was made to Journal A from a laboratory in a different country. In April 2004 it was bought to the editor’s attention that the manuscript was a verbatim copy of a paper published in 2003 in another journal, Journal B. The only difference between the manuscripts was that the names and affiliations of the authors on the second paper were different to the first paper.

A new Editor was appointed to a society journal in a minority medical specialty. An officer of the society immediately handed him an anonymous letter from a reader of the journal complaining that an article recently published was unethical. The Editor is a personal friend both of the previous editor who accepted the paper, and the author of the paper. The paper is by a single author who gives no affiliation to an academic organisation.

A journal published an animal study on the use of drug X for the treatment of clinical condition A. The authors did not declare any competing interests. A few months after publication, a journalist contacted the editors to say that the corresponding author had several patents on drug X, was listed as an inventor of the drug, and that the public charity of which he is the director recently announced that they were seeking approval for clinical trials of drug X in condition B.

An experiment on a volunteer in hospital was written up. The volunteer was an asthmatic who was stable at the time and given a combination of intravenous magnesium sulphate and salbutamol to observe the pharmacological effects. The drugs were given under supervision in intensive care as they carry some risk of cardiovascular side effects.

Dr X asked for a statement to be published to the effect that the letter he had published in the journal with two co-authors was not based on any work that he had done, but on that of his colleagues. The editor asked the other two authors why they had signed a copyright form in these circumstances. Both authors stated that they had not signed any such form, and when presented with a copy, stated that their signatures had been forged.

A concise report on a rare disease was submitted and sent out to an internationally renowned reviewer in the field. He felt that some of the data had been obtained in his unit, and this had not been acknowledged by the authors. The authors responded that the tests had been performed in their own laboratory, but that the scans had indeed been done elsewhere.

A paper suggested that a cluster of symptoms, signs, and tests could be combined to diagnose pneumonia in general practice. The paper was rejected after being read by two editors, because it was preliminary and had not been validated in an independent population. The authors submitted a new manuscript the following year, describing the same patients and focusing on the accuracy of individual symptoms and test results in differentiating bacterial from viral chest infections.