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1999

Case

Rights of reviewers

99-18

A clinical professor of medicine was asked to act as a reviewer for a submitted paper.The paper had not been presented publicly or in abstract form. The reviewer returned an extensive list of suggested alterations, but rated the paper highly. The other two reviewers also rated the paper highly, but suggested only minor modifications. The editor invited the authors to undertake a minor revision and subsequently accepted the revised paper without sending it back to the three reviewers.

Case

Submission without knowledge of the corresponding author

99-17

A case report was received and the corresponding author was duly notified. The corresponding (and senior author) immediately faxed back, asking who had submitted the case report as he had not been consulted and had not seen the manuscript.The submission letter contained the names of all four authors; three of the signatures had been made using the same pen and probably the same hand.The signature of the senior and corresponding author was clearly “pp”.

Case

Author dispute and dual submission

99-16

A case report was submitted for consideration and, following favourable review, was accepted for publication by Journal A. All three authors signed the copyright release form, but about six weeks later a request not to publish the article was received by e-mail, which was attributed to a “misunderstanding and argument between two of the authors.” The editor wrote to all three authors expressing concern, but after six weeks none of them had responded.

Case

A further case of redundant publication

99-15

A paper was submitted to a UK specialist medical journal. At review, one of the reviewers alerted the editor to the fact that a very similar paper had been published in a US specialist title. It seems very likely that the reports describe the same randomised controlled trial. The only piece of new information was not an important outcome of the trial. The authors did not disclose the existence of the first paper.

Case

Should editors get involved in authorship disputes?

99-14

A paper from Finland in a controversial area of vaccine research was peer reviewed and provisionally accepted. At the revision stage, the journal received a letter from a researcher based at an immunotherapy company in the United States, raising serious doubts over the analysis of the Finnish data. This author claimed to have been involved in the research, and proposed an alternative interpretation of the data.

Case

The discontented and abandoned contributor

99-13

A paper was rejected after peer review. Some time later a researcher wrote to say that he had been involved at the beginning of the study, but had withdrawn his name because he felt the study was defective. He had heard that the study had been submitted for publication, and thought it better that the editors were made aware of his doubts before publication rather than afterwards. As the paper had already been rejected, these questions didn’t arise.

Case

The careless surgeon

99-12

A paper was submitted in which a young surgeon described five patients who died over six months under the care of one surgeon. The author suggested that the surgeon was dangerous and that something should have been done. Nothing was done and the surgeon has since retired. The paper, a very personal one, provides an interesting insight into the difficulties that doctors have dealing with problem colleagues. Should the editors: _ attempt to get consent from the patients’ relatives?

Case

The anonymous critic

99-11

A letter containing details of a case report was submitted in February 1999. The authors were from Japan. After peer review and revision, the case report was accepted and a proof was sent to the authors. Two anonymous letters were then received, one on April 29 and another on 12 May, both from Japan.

Case

A first report, not followed by a second

99-10

In 1984, journal X published a brief report of a randomised trial as a letter to the editor. No full publication of this trial followed, despite calls for this from colleagues in the field. It took the intervention of a regional research ethics committee and a dean to persuade the investigators to write a final manuscript.This paper has still not been submitted for publication, although some of the data are available in the Cochrane library.

Case

Redundant publication and change of authors

99-09

A paper was submitted to journal A with a covering letter stating that it was entirely original. However, when the editor looked at the references he found considerable overlap with a paper already published in journal B about the same infection outbreak, but with a completely different set of authors bar one. A comparison of the papers showed that there was considerable overlap.

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