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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.

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Showing 201–220 of 300 results
  • Case

    Author dispute over internal report

    Author A was paid to facilitate a meeting and write a meeting report for internal purposes.  He was paid to do this by author C’s company. The report was posted as a PDF on author C’s company website. No authors were listed on the report. Authors B, C and D co-authored an article that has been published in a journal supplement.  It later transpired that the main substance of this journal…
  • Case

    Plagiarism case

    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. The letter, sent by…
  • Case

    Duplicate publication?

    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. The two articles were not related to the article submitted to the editors, but as the…
  • Case

    An attempt to publish data already published elsewhere

    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 publ…
  • Case

    Definition of plagiarism?

    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…
  • Case

    Is retraction justified because of an author dispute over permission to use data?

    Author X recently published a paper in Journal Y and has asked for the paper to be retracted. The reason given is that part of the data presented in the paper was published without the permission of a colleague, who is not listed as an author of the paper (and probably does not qualify for full authorship). This colleague is now seeking to publish the data in another journal and it is implied t…
  • Case

    Duplicate submission

    An article was submitted simultaneously to our journal and another journal (who is a member of COPE) on the same date. Both journals received letters saying that the article had not been submitted to another journal. When they received a favourable response from the other journal, and the article was published, we were informed by the authors that they wished to withdraw the paper from our jour…
  • Case

    Conflict of interest

    After peer-review, a general medical journal published a household survey of violence following a coup against the country’s elected President. The survey revealed high levels of violence and human rights abuses, only a small minority of which were attributed to supporters of the deposed regime. The manuscript stated that none of the interviewers had political affiliations and the authors decla…
  • Case

    Possible duplicate publication

    An article by a Far Eastern group was published in our journal in November 2005. We were later alerted by an interested reader that the same article, slightly changed, was published in an American journal. I contacted the American journal and the article will now be officially retracted from that journal. Part of the explanation could be poor communication between the authors, but I am not sure…
  • Case

    Repetitive duplicate submission to multiple journals and redundant publication

    This case came to light when the editors of two journals (J1 and J2) established that the same manuscript (MsA) had been submitted to both journals simultaneously. On bringing this information to the attention of the author, stating the seriousness with which this action was viewed and requesting an explanation, the author apologised and withdrew the manuscript from both journals w…
  • Case

    Duplicate publication

    Author X contacted the editor of Journal A to enquire whether the journal would be interested in a review of a new concept in the treatment of a disease, written by author X and two co-authors. Author X said that his co-authors had suggested writing the paper for another journal but he had convinced them to submit the paper to Journal A. The editor invited submission and, after peer review, the…
  • Case

    A case of parallel publication?

    Paper A appeared in a foreign language journal, together with an English abstract. Paper B was submitted to us, and one of our referees alerted us to the similar content. Closer inspection, including retrieval of the original foreign language manuscript and review by a deputy editor with a working knowledge of that language, and inspection of the tables by the editor and another editor,…
  • Case

    Possible fabricated data: a conspiracy of silence?

    I became involved in this issue after reports from doctors in a developing country that three papers in a systematic review published by my company may have been fabricated. The papers in question had co-authors in two other countries and so I contacted them. One co-author replied that he had concerns, but as none of the studies was conducted in his country, he had no data. He sai…
  • Case

    Request for a retraction of a retraction

    In October 2000, a journal published a retraction of a February 2000 publication of a research paper. In the same issue the dean of the corresponding author’s medical school reported the findings of an investigational committee that found, contrary to what was stated in the paper: ·        There was no ethics committee…
  • Case

    Dual submission

    Paper 1 was submitted to journal A. The paper dealt with monitoring of a chemical element in various occupations in a range of workplaces. Samples were taken from the workplace air and bodily fluids of the workers, and conclusions were drawn about what metabolite should be measured in order to estimate a worker’s dose of the element. The chosen reviewers were experts in relevant biological moni…
  • Case

    Author dispute over need for retraction

    The authors of a paper are in disagreement over whether the paper should be retracted.  One group of authors (group 1) wishes to publish a correction, and another group (group 2) feel that is inadequate, and the paper should be retracted.  Group 2 is concerned that one of the authors, author X, in group 1 is guilty of scientific misconduct. The remaining group 1 authors do not support this clai…
  • Case

    Duplicate publication

    An email was received from a reader indicating a possible duplicate publication of an article that appeared in the journal in 2004, and a similar publication that appeared in another journal in 2003. The Editor immediately wrote to the author, and to the editor of the other journal, expressing his concerns. The author responded five days later saying that he did not believe that the papers were…
  • Case

    Dual submission

    A referee’s report on a paper informed this editor that the authors had submitted a very similar paper to another journal. Both papers analyse the same 30 cases of an unusual neoplasm, and the tables and five of the photomicrographs are identical. There is also considerable duplication of text in the article. We have written to the authors requesting them to clarify how this has arisen a…
  • Case

    Duplicate publication

    A reader contacted the editorial staff of Journal A after noticing that Journal B, which is primarily non-English, had published a paper that was remarkably similar.      The editor of journal A contacted the editor of Journal B.  Both editors reviewed the two papers and agreed that the paper from Journal B contained methods, results, and conclusions that formed a part of the paper from Journal…
  • Case

    Duplicate submission, self-plagiarism

    The journal commissioned a Seminar that arrived in September 2004 and was sent for peer review. In March 2005, we received a peer reviewer’s comments pointing out a very similar paper by the same authors in another journal, published in December 2004. On careful comparison, there was over 70% text copied word-for-word, sometimes with trivial alterations, from the previous publication.

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