A paper concerning the prevention of coronary disease in primary care was received. This examined the practical consequences of following some recent national recommendations and suggested that the recommendations were unrealistic. A few weeks later another paper from the same authors was submitted, which the editor who first read it thought was probably an inadvertent duplicate submission of the same paper. On comparing the two papers, however, they were not identical. They had different titles, and although the second one contained a very substantial amount of the same material as the first one, it added on a suggested solution to the problem. Neither the covering letter to the second paper nor the paper itself made any reference to the earlier submission. The authors were asked to explain why they had submitted the material in this way. They replied that they had conceived the papers as a series—they envisaged further ones to follow. They had not referred to the first paper in the second one as it had not yet been accepted for publication, and they thought it was unnecessary to make any mention of the first paper in the covering letter to the second one as they assumed that we would realise that they were related. They acknowledged that the degree of overlap between the two papers was unacceptable. The journal decided that there had been no deliberate intention to mislead and that the apology from the authors should be accepted. Nevertheless, the way the authors had handled these submissions seemd very odd, and can pose problems for a general medical journal with a substantial number of submissions. Papers may go in the first instance to be read by anyone of a number of editors, so there is a strong possibility that related papers like this will go to different editors and will get a long way down the line of assessment before someone realises that there is major overlap between them. It happened in this case that both papers went to the same editor, but usually this would not happen. Does COPE have any views on how this sort of situation should be prevented and what action should be taken when it does arise? The journal’s advice to authors is clear about the importance of advising if there are previous related papers that have been published or submitted.
Write to the authors pointing out that they must be explicit about what they are actually submitting.
The editor wrote to the authors pointing out that they must be explicit about what they are actually submitting.