2015

Editorial office staff at journal A noticed possible image manipulation in two figures of a new paper submitted by author X. These suspected manipulations involved images of gels which appeared to contain multiple duplicated bands. This prompted editorial staff to look at the submission history of author X to journal A in more detail.

We received an original article which was accepted and published. The article was written by multiple authors from several centres, and the corresponding author undertook the task of standardising the content, making several corrections to the original text. The author proofs were sent to the corresponding author, who reviewed them.

In April 2014, our journal received a case report from author A with co-authors B, C, D and E. After undergoing a first round of revisions pertaining only to the paper’s format, author A excluded co-authors C, D, and E from the revised version and retained co-author B, without notifying the journal of this change. After this change, the manuscript underwent the complete evaluation process, comprising peer review and revisions by the authors. It was accepted for publication in July 2014.

We routinely ask for ethics committee approval from every research manuscript submitted to our journal. Sometimes, studies from different countries may not have ethics committee approval and authors may claim that their study does not need approval. In such situations, we consult COPE’s “Guidance for Editors: Research, Audit and Service Evaluations” document and evaluate the study at the editorial board and decide whether or not it needs approval.

Our journal publishes case reports describing the evaluation, diagnosis and treatment of unusual cases. Parents must provide written informed consent prior to manuscript submission. No cases are presented with unique identifiers and each is anonymised as much as possible.

A paper was submitted to our journal. The associate editor assigned to the paper immediately assigned a reviewer who he knew was well qualified to give a good review, as they had worked with the authors before. The editor did think it odd that the reviewer was not an author on this particular paper, given the close collaboration. However, when invited, the reviewer (R1), did not flag up any conflict of interest or request that they should be an author on the paper.

The author was the subject of his study. He depleted himself of a vital nutrient until he had overt clinical and biochemical signs of the deficiency. He monitored various biochemical parameters as he became more deficient and submitted two manuscripts presenting his results: one detailing the biochemical changes and one detailing the differences in results obtained from different commercially available assays for the nutrient.

In 2014 we received a communication from the Research Integrity Officer of an academic institution informing us that a paper, published in our journal in 2013, included falsified or fabricated data. We were informed that, following an investigation, they had determined that scientific misconduct had occurred.

We received a review paper and it was accepted and published on our website. We then noticed that one of the figures had been copied from a paper published in another journal.

A paper was submitted to a medical journal reporting original research on human subjects. Two corresponding authors, author A (first in authors’ list) and author B (last in the list) were listed. The paper was sent to external referees but while it was under review, the editor received an email from author A stating that s/he had not read the paper, was not aware of the submission and did not agree with the submission. Author A did not provide any specifics of the disagreement.