2007

The editors of a scientific journal were sent a letter of complaint from Drs A and B who noticed that a paper had been published online ahead of the print edition authored by Dr C.

A letter was sent to the editor indicating that three articles (one of them in the editor’s journal) on identical subjects had been published in the same year (2006) by the same authors, accusing the first author of all three articles of stealing data from and plagiarising a previously published article from the academic institution where the first author previously worked.

A case report was submitted to journal X reporting on a child who had been admitted to hospital suffering an injury, which the doctors suspected resulted from a deliberate cigarette burn. This was not proved until the child returned to hospital with other non-accidental injuries, and following a full criminal investigation the child’s parents were convicted of child abuse.

An online post-publication literature evaluation service, aiming to highlight the best articles in medicine, received an evaluation of an article whose authors were based at the same institution as the evaluator. The editor asked the contributor if he/she had any involvement in the study and received the following response: “I am based at the university but did not participate in the design of the study. I occasionally cross-covered some of the patients when a co-author was out of town”.

The editors of this journal check all articles against Medline for possible redundant publications. Two very similar articles from an author were retrieved when the name of the author was searched. The titles were very similar, except for the name of the disease. The abstracts had almost 50% identical wording.

An online post-publication literature evaluation service, aiming to highlight the best articles in medicine, received an evaluation of an article on which the evaluator was listed as an author on PubMed. The editor queried the evaluation and the evaluator replied explaining s/he had no involvement with the study but had commented on it.

A paper was submitted to this journal and sent out to be refereed. The paper had five authors, all from the same institution and department. The bulk of the data were contained in four tables. One of the reviewers pointed out that these four tables were identical (verbatim) to those published recently in a paper by the same five authors in another journal.

The paper was rejected for publication (the other reviewer recommended rejection for other reasons).

In 1997 a book was published (in Italian) on the life of an Italian composer, assembled through analysis of his mummified remains.  Author A contributed a chapter on anthropological analysis (chapter X) and author B co-authored a chapter on paleopathology (chapter Y).

In 2003, our journal published an article (in English) co-authored by author B on the paleopathology of the same composer.

We have noticed some authors who are publishing at a rate that is exceptionally high.

(1) An author of a recent submission has published over 100 articles since January 2005; he had published fewer than 50 in the preceding 5 years. This is quite a sudden increase. On average, he published 1 article every 8 days in 2005, and in 2006 this increased to 1 every 4 days. The author is on the board of his institute, and is a department head.

An editorial board member received a complaint of suspected financial fraud in the working of a particular journal and was presented with limited evidence of the same. The editorial board member was invited by the editor to serve on the board and has just completed his tenure. The fraud has apparently been committed by the editor himself.

Is there any ethical binding on the editorial board member to investigate the so called fraud?