You are here

Home Guidance

Case

COPE Members bring specific (anonymised) publication ethics issues to the COPE Forum for discussion and advice. The advice from the COPE Forum meetings is specific to the particular case under consideration and may not necessarily be applicable to similar cases either past or future. The advice is given by the Forum participants (COPE Council and COPE Members from across all regions and disciplines).

COPE Members may submit a case for consideration.

Filter by topic

Search results for 'supervisor'

Showing 21–26 of 26 results
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Misattributed authorship and unauthorized use of data

    …author B and author C (both PhD students under the director's supervision) were listed as coauthors without their knowledge. Additionally, he claimed that author D (author A's supervisor at his primary affiliation) was not in any way involved in the research described in the article and should be removed from the authors list. The director stated that he wishes for the article to be withdrawn.
  • Case

    Concern about reporting of a trial and also its DSMB

    …a final comprehensive look at our data analysis before the paper was submitted for publication. Importantly, he never supervised (like an academic supervisor) data analysis at any time point before database lock and processing of the data by the clinical research organization. We will change the terminology accordingly.” We subsequently found that X was also an author on the previous trial.
  • Case

    Authorship issue

    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. Their primary complaint was that they were not included in the authorship and should have been. Other points made in their (rather confusing letters) were that: they had contributed to the paper in the sense t…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Paper submitted for publication without consent or knowledge of co-authors

    …the institute. So the issue may be taken out of the hands of the editor. Some suggested there was a lack of mentorship and failure of supervision—what was the PhD supervisor doing? Most agreed that there were no grounds for retraction. An author dispute is not sufficient grounds to retract an article if there is no issue with the scientific content of the article. However, as the editor does…
  • Case

    Plagiarism, double submission and reviewer ethicality

    …should assess the level of overlap and consider retraction of the second paper if the overlap is unacceptable. A3 was a junior author but was also the supervisor on the paper but it may be that publication practices were not correctly understood. The advice from the Forum was to address the plagiarism issue. If there is an acceptable explanation, then the editor should consider the less serious offense…
  • Case

    Alleged unauthorized use of data and possible dual publication

    …or removed all unpublished data for which no data were available. In the meantime (and before any action was taken), the senior author, prompted by the reviewer’s email to him, emailed the managing editor and the associate editor, informing them that the non-preferred reviewer used to be the senior author’s PhD supervisor. The senior author rejected as incorrect any claims over the…

Pages