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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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Search results for 'dual submission'

Showing 41–60 of 307 results
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Submissions from members of the editorial board

    …manuscripts was delayed for two reasons. At first, essential forms (such as the conflict of interest statements) were missing and the editor-in-chief received the manuscripts 10–35 days after submission when the administrative checklist was complete. In addition, it was difficult to recruit reviewers who were willing to assess the manuscripts over the summer, and several papers were within a rather narrow…
  • Case

    Repetitive duplicate submission to multiple journals and redundant publication

    …submitted to J1, J2, and J5 after being simultaneously submitted to and rejected by J3 and J4. Author withdrew Ms from J1 and J2 after being asked for an explanation which was not provided. Manuscript B (MsB): MsB was simultaneously submitted to J1, J3, J6, and J8; submissions dates were staggered and overlap occurred between at least two journals at any one time but not quite…
  • Case

    Alleged unauthorized use of data and possible dual publication

    During review of a manuscript submitted to our journal, a dispute arose over some of the data used in the database that was described in the submitted paper. The authors listed several preferred reviewers and also one non-preferred reviewer (without giving reasons). The journal’s submission site states that the editors will consider the authors’ preferred suggestions but are under no…
  • Case
    On-going

    Duplicate submission and authorship dispute

    A case report was submitted to our journal (journal X) in February and accepted for publication in September that same year. In late September, the first author on the manuscript contacted us to inform us that this exact case report had just been published in another journal (journal Y) by some of his colleagues, including some of the authors of our manuscript. In the initial submission to our…
  • Case

    Inadvertent discovery of salami submission

    The journal submitting this case to COPE sent a paper [paper 1] to a reviewer who wrote this in the review: “…That apart, this manuscript seems to be another report of the already published **** trial, looking at the data from a slightly different angle. I am not convinced, however, that the data is worthy of so many submissions.” And, in a separate email to…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Duplicate submission or self plagiarism. Is the author to blame?

    …organisers did not inform the authors. After the response from the journal, the authors wrote to the conference organisers asking them to retract the article from their website. The conference organisers are not replying to the emails from the authors.    Questions for COPE Council Is this a case of duplicate submission/self plagiarism with the authors being unaware?…
  • Case

    Attempt at multiple plagiarism

    In January 2004 a submission was made to Journal A from a laboratory in a different country. In April 2004 it was bought to the editor’s attention that the manuscript was a verbatim copy of a paper published in 2003 in another journal, Journal B. The only difference between the manuscripts was that the names and affiliations of the authors on the second paper were different to the first paper.…
  • Case
    On-going

    Institutions paying authors to be named on papers

    …in the acknowledgment section that the institution gave a partial grant. The terms funding and grant are used to camouflage the purpose. Questions for the Forum How can such malpractices be reduced?  Are there any checks that can be adopted via the submission system or by the editorial team to avoid this issue? …
  • Case

    Duplicate publication based on government data

    …neither of the editors had been informed of the submission to another journal. The editor wrote back to the author requesting a copy of the letter sent to the editor of Journal B. The letter made no mention of the previous submission to Journal A. The copied letter of submission to Journal B was not dated, but an accompanying letter from the author said that it had been sent in the week of 25 July. Both…
  • Case

    Submission of a paper by a reviewer

    An editor sent out a paper to three reviewers. One of them, who gave the paper a favourable review, enclosed a research letter on the same topic, with, in his view, a better study design. He told the editor that the author of the paper had encouraged him to submit it during a meeting they both attended. He added that he thought its inclusion would make a good complementary pair of papers. The e…
  • Case
    On-going

    Submission of article by ghost author

    …reputationally or financially, by pursuing the case.    The journal may also want to inform the institutions where the submitting authors are based (with the agreement of the student) and check whether they have any other submissions published or in progress in case these are also plagiarised. Finally, it would be worth investigating how the submitting authors accessed the thesis: are they from the…
  • Case

    Developing novel approaches to improve the assessment of absolute risk among patients with cardiovascular disease

    The possibility of dual publication of two papers with almost identical titles and an identical list of authors emerged in the course of appointing a short-listing panel for an NHS award. The potential duplication was spotted in the publications list of an applicant for the award, who was not the first author on either paper. The editor of Journal A, in which one of the papers was in press,…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Meta-analysis: submission of unreliable findings

    …confusion surrounding the case. Going forward, the editor should consider revising journal policy to request authors to send any related papers under submission to them when they submit an article.…
  • Case

    Duplicate submission, overlap of papers, and a referenced paper that was not in press

    …authors highlighting what “good practice” is—that is, declaring submissions elsewhere and emphasising the difference between a paper that has simply been submitted, and one that is “in press. ”…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Submission of an already published case report

    A case report was received at the journal. A covering letter was supplied by the two authors stating “Our work has not been published elsewhere and we have been actively involved in the preparation of the paper. No conflict of interest. Not published elsewhere. Patient consent obtained for case report and images to be published”. Originality is very highly graded in the referee’s marking…
  • Case

    Triplicate publication with possibly different data in each

    A paper describing an outbreak of infectious disease was submitted to three journals. The submission to one journal described the index case; the submission to another included investigation and follow up of other cases and contacts in the country where the outbreak had occurred. The third paper looked at the spread of the disease into other countries. A considerable amount of the…
  • Case

    A case of plagiarism

    We had already taken action on this case and case 06-09 but for future cases which might arise we were interested to know COPE’s view. The Editorial Board discussed the COPE views but decided that as the two matters were now largely history it was not worth taking further action. Since then, however, we have had a further case of partial dual submission, and the COPE discussion on 06-09 has…
  • Case

    Unethical withdrawal of a paper

    …reviews.’ No mention was made that the paper was in a conference proceedings or is under consideration for possible inclusion in other journals. Editor A decided to handle the review process himself and assigned reviewers to review the submission. Later, Author A sent a letter to the Editorial Assistant indicating that he/she was requesting that the submission be withdrawn from review. Author A’s…
  • Case
    Case Closed

    Serial plagiarism by an experienced author

    Suspicions were raised on 20 September 2012 by a reviewer who commented that some of the passages in a submission from Dr J were similar to an earlier paper published in our journal by the same author. An iThenticate check indicated a similarity index of 60%: however, the overlap was not from that earlier paper but from another source by a different author which had contributed 41% of the…
  • Case
    On-going

    Ethics approval for survey design

    A manuscript was submitted to disseminate a cross correlational survey research study. The manuscript states that the data were collected through surveys for the two calendar months prior to initial manuscript submission, which occurred in the middle of the third month. The initial submission indicated the research followed the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, but no other human…

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