A manuscript was received from a group of authors who had not submitted to the journal in question before. The review was extremely critical and the paper was rejected. In a covering letter the reviewer said that not only was the experimental design flawed, but he was also convinced that the experiment described had never been done. He had scanned Medline 1997–2001 and found seven other papers with the same first author each of which had a similar protocol, but in each case had used a different nutritional supplement. All the studies had been conducted on groups of 40 subjects who were given either a supplement or control substance over a period of one year. This implied that the authors had recruited over 300 subjects for these studies, which was hard to believe. The entry criteria for the study meant that the pool of eligible subjects was small, and the protocol was rigorous, not to say unethical, so it would have been difficult to have obtained informed consent. What, if anything, does COPE suggest be done to investigate the suspected fraud?
_ As the paper had been rejected, it would be difficult to obtain further information from the authors. _ Make the authors aware that the reviewer had expressed concern and ask them to provide further evidence, but not the raw data. _ The reviewer should not be involved, and any concerns being raised should come from the editor, not the reviewer. _ In view of the seven other published papers, the editor would need to establish whether this was a prima facie case before contacting the other journals. _ Write to the authors, but if no reply is received then contact he head of the institution. _ Due to the serious nature of this case, impose a time limit, of say, four weeks, to obtain a response.
No reply had been received from either the authors or the heads of their institutes. As the paper has already been rejected, and the editor has now retired from the journal editorship there is very little leverage to make them reply.