- Event
COPE Forum: Monday 5 November 2018
…18-11 Increased number of casual submissions 18-12 A pre-submission inquiry with a bribe 18-13 Self-plagiarism and suspected salami publishing 18-14 Authorship conflict 18-15 Peer reviewer contacted by author 18-16 Data fabrication in a rejected manuscript 18-17 Possible plagiarism 18-18 Victim of article theft wants correction to list… - Event
COPE Forum: Monday 11 February 2019
…by author 18-17 Victim of article theft wants correction to list their name, not retraction Read the cases and questions for the Forum #C0PEForum… - Webform
COPE integrity workshop 2021
…Facilitation and Integrity at COPE: prevention, education and best practices in publication ethics 21 April 2021, online workshop, COPE members only 16:00-17:30 British Summer Time (UTC + 1) Find out what time this is in your country - Event
COPE Forum: 3 February 2017 4pm (GMT)
…of the cases will be discussed at both meetings. Forum agenda & materials… - Case
Submission of an already published case report
A case report was received at the journal. A covering letter was supplied by the two authors stating “Our work has not been published elsewhere and we have been actively involved in the preparation of the paper. No conflict of interest. Not published elsewhere. Patient consent obtained for case report and images to be published”. Originality is very highly graded in the referee’s marking… - Case
Would the loss of a clinical licence in one country impact on the ability to do clinical work in another?
The associate editor of journal X identified author Y on a submission paper as someone who had lost their license to practice due to malpractice. As part of the settlement, author Y had agreed to refrain from providing services to patients. Author Y now resides on a different continent, and the study presented in the submission was apparently carried out in in this continent. There is no mentio… - Case
Possible plagiarism and fabrication
…sentences and wording as the first. This concerns all parts of the paper. The only significant “new” sentences, mainly in the discussion, are on the role of drug C. 2. The second paper cites 27 references, 17 of which are identical to the references in the first paper. Of the 10 “new” references, six are on drug C, and two on issues related to the surgery. 3. Demographic and surgical data, reported as… - Case
Citing a retracted paper
…one might quite reasonably want to cite some key retracted papers to illustrate the issues involved. However, it is very important to mark the paper as retracted in the reference section so this is clearly marked for readers (eg, Author AB, et al. RETRACTED: Title of article. Journal name. 2015, 100: 1-7.) … - Event
COPE Forum: September 2022
…cases. Submit a case to COPE Forum Do you have a publication ethics case you'd like to bring to the COPE Forum for discussion and advice? Submit a case The deadline to submit a case for this Forum is: Tuesday 13 September 2022. Forum agenda On 27 September 2022 the COPE Forum will be held at 16:00-17:30pm (BST… - Case
Not getting consent from an ethics committee
We had provisionally accepted a randomised controlled trial of an exclusion diet given to young children with a particular condition. The trial design was that one group started the exclusion diet a month before the second group. In other words, both were given the “treatment.” One part of the trial was that children who were thought to have an allergy to a particular food were rechallenged wit… - Case
Dual submission
Journal A received a paper that was rejected without peer review as it was very poorly written. There was no clear evidence of original work, it seemed to be mainly a vehicle for advertising a piece of equipment/technique developed by the authors, and it was only marginally relevant to the journal’s area of interest. A month later, the first author of the paper submitted the same paper to Journ… - Case
Ethics approval for audit 3
In this case, an international organisation wished to study the use of various regimens for medical termination of pregnancy in a developing world setting where termination of pregnancy is not supported by the state. They have performed an audit and have obtained data which will be of considerable value in other similar settings around the world. However, they are not willing to state the ident… - News
In the news: October 2018 Digest
…available here (https://bookbook.pubpub.org/oki)http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/09/17/in-a-globalised… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: October 2020
…href="https://publicationethics.org/publishers-perspective-paper-mills">publisher perspective that describes collective actions required to help address these issues. Finally, my congratulations to Michal Tal-Socher and Adrian Ziderman, authors of a paper funded by a COPE research grant. Their paper, Data sharing policies in scholarly publications: interdisciplinary comparisons, has been… - Case
Ethical dilemma involving religious beliefs
The editor and co-editors of a book have a query concerning an ethical dilemma involving possible authors for a book chapter. The book concerns certain diseases in pregnancy and the authors have been approached to contribute a chapter. Both authors are apparently deeply religious and have expressed a strong concern about contributing to a book in which views may be expressed that are aga… Common ethical and editorial dilemmas of author misconduct: how should we respond?
…0 2001 39 30 9 0 2002 18 14 4 0 2003 22 15 5 2 2004 25* 17 7 1 Total 212 163…- Case
Anonymous peer review – author requesting manuscript file
Two manuscripts were submitted, reviewed as sister manuscripts by the journal, and rejected on the basis of negative reviews. The author took issue with one particularly negative review and appealed our decision. We sought the advice of an editorial board member who reviewed the manuscripts and the reports and agreed that the correct editorial decision was made.… - Case
Is it plagiarism to use text verbatim from a manuscript review?
A commentary was reviewed by journal A and rejected. The paper was then submitted and accepted at journal B. Journal B published the commentary. After publication, a reviewer from journal A wrote to journal B with a complaint of plagiarism. Text from his/her review was used in the commentary published in journal B Question(s) for the COPE Forum• How should the editor of jo… - Case
Withdrawal request by an author
We received a request by an author who states not to have contributed to an article published in 2015. The author claims that his name was used without his knowledge and that the corresponding author has been retired for several years and can no longer be reached. At the time of submission, we received a copyright transfer signed with the author’s name (we request all authors to sign the form).… - Case
Ethics of non-active management of a control group
An article was submitted involving over 200 pregnant patients with a systemic illness (from 2010 to 2015) who were recruited and assigned to a control group or an active intervention group (of their systemic illness). The control group received routine antenatal care while the intervention group had active surveillance and management of their systemic illness during the pregnancy. There…