- Case
The tortuous tale of a paper, a letter and an editorial
Dr A submitted an article to journal X that was published in 1996. Dr B wrote to the editor in January 1997, pointing out an error by Dr A. Shortly afterwards, Dr B submitted a longer editorial to the journal discussing the issue raised by this error in a much wider context. Dr B then withdrew the article and submitted it to journal Y at the end of March, with a covering letter in which he wrot… - Case
Attempted redundant publication?
Seven authors sent us a paper on hospital infections in children. We sent the paper to two reviewers, one of whom sent back a detailed comparison between the paper submitted to us and a paper published in another journal in 1996. The reviewer’s comments were: “Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that the study and its results have been published previously, comments with some further… - Case
Disagreement between a reviewer and an author
We sent a paper to a reviewer, who suggested that we should reject the paper, principally because he thought it “virtually identical to a paper in press by the same authors”. We rejected the paper with these comments. The author came back to us saying that he did not believe that he had had a fair review of his paper because, he thought, the reviewer had a conflict of interest. He wrote: “The…