2005

Journal A published a paper in 2002.  In 2004 the Editor of Journal A was contacted by a reader, who expressed his doubts as to the integrity of one of the authors associated with the 2002 paper.  The reader suggested that the author in question had been involved in the fraudulent publication of a paper published in Journal B in 2001.  The reader had noted that the article published in Journal B in 2001 was almost an exact copy of an article published in Journal C in 1990.

In 2003 a paper was published in a specialist surgical journal following proper peer review.  The paper summarised the experience of a group of clinicians concerned in treating malignancy in the Head and Neck using a novel method of therapy - and was a case series of 25 patients.  The paper was not considered to be one of high priority but was published because of the paucity of information concerning this method of treatment in the literature.  The principal author had 3 co-authors all of wh

We have just had a paper submitted as an ethical debate in which the author details ethical concerns about a study previously published in another journal. The study involved complementary/alternative therapy for an infectious disease in children. The author alleges that the study gave insufficient protection to vulnerable subjects, who were exposed to unwarranted risks and discomfort; and that the study had violated the accepted tenets of human studies ethics and national regulations.

In summary, we have a case series, with no control group, of patients with different conditions treated for an undiagnosed underlying condition with an arbitrarily prescribed dosage of a drug which is not registered for treating any of the conditions nor the undiagnosed underlying condition. I rejected the paper for publication and let the author know that the ethics committee of the journal will review the paper.

We had a case of suspected plagiarism recently on one of our journals, on which I would appreciate COPE’s advice. The case has been resolved, so this is not in the least urgent, but I would be interested to hear your views.

Information on competitors participating in a popular sporting activity was obtained from a website in the public domain. The authors used this data to see if the competitors' personal characteristics (height, weight etc.) affected their chances of winning. The editor asked the authors how they obtained consent from the competitors for this study. The authors responded saying that this data was in the public domain and therefore exempt from any requirement for ethics review.

A review article by an expert group plagiarised an article from another journal. It was largely a direct translation, involving large slabs of the text. Some of the authors are on the editorial board of the journal where the paper was published. There was no declaration that this was a translation of another article.

A paper submitted to Journal A was rejected after critical peer review. Although the data and methods were sound, the data in the paper were not new and had been described, at least in part, in previous publications. The authors could also have combined the outcomes in the current paper with previous papers, thereby avoiding salami publication. The methods section was opaque, making it very difficult to decipher which subjects were new and which were already counted in previous studies.

An observational study submitted to an institutional journal was sent for peer review. The authors were invited to submit a revision six months later. They did so, but had not responded fully to the reviewers' points, so they were asked for further clarification of their selection criteria, publication plan, and evidence of ethical approval. A paper by the same authors describing the same cohort had been published in another journal, and there was considerable overlap.

A paper was published in an Italian language journal, together with an English abstract. A second paper was submitted to a UK journal, one of whose referees spotted the similar content.