- Case
Concern about reporting of a trial and also its DSMB
We received a paper reporting a trial. There has only been one previous trial of this intervention in this condition that we know of (which was also done by these investigators). There were substantial issues with the reporting of that trial but the end result, as reported by them, favoured the intervention. The trial we received, presumably approved after that result had come out, had… - Case
Has formal ethical approval been granted that satisfies publication criteria?
The issue here is whether formal ethics approval has been granted in order to satisfy publication criteria. By way of some background information, a lot of screening data are collected on many athletes in many sports, both nationally and internationally. Historically, clubs and associations have disclaimers whereby athletes sign consent for their data to be used for audit purposes on the provis… - Case
Duplicate publication or salami publication?
An author submitted an article to my journal. The editorial board discovered that the author had already published his article in another journal. The editorial board communicated with the author and he defended himself stating that they were two different articles with different titles. However, the editorial board could find no significant difference between the two papers. There are t… - Case
Suspected contact between reviewer and an author led to coauthorship of the reviewer
A manuscript was submitted via our electronic submission system and processed in accordance with the standard procedures of the journal. This was originally a single author submission, and in the covering letter the author suggested two potential reviewers. The Associate Editor assigned reviewers, choosing reviewer A along the suggestions of the author, and reviewer B from his own list o… - Case
Possible serial misconduct in relation to coauthors and other activities
I am the editor of an international clinical journal and am facing a very unusual problem that does not fit readily into COPE flowcharts. Through a reviewer, I was informed that an author had submitted a paper without the approval of at least one of the other authors. This appeared to be confirmed by two other authors. In response to my bringing this possibility to the first author’s at… - Case
An authorship dispute and a question about when a paper is considered published
Authors A and B submitted a paper PV1 to an international conference which was accepted by the editor E of the conference proceedings. The copyright of the paper was assigned to the publishers PC of the conference proceedings. The editor E of the conference proceedings is also the editor of an international journal J published by PJ. The editor E invited author A to consider submitting a revis… - Case
Advice regarding a weird type of content and its authorship
Our company publishes clinical pathways. They were initially authored by local experts, but have since been retrofitted with evidence, if possible. This was done by expert “evidologists”, not clinical experts; they were acknowledged solely by their company name (it was “out-sourced”). If the evidence did not fit, the pathway was discarded. We undertake to review all of the pathways… - Case
Paper published that is a verbatim copy of another published one by another author
This is a report of two cases of possible misconduct by the same author(s): one that was identified during the review process and one only after it was published. We believe the author tried to publish a paper that was a verbatim copy of one that had appeared in another journal a few years earlier. A vigilant reviewer of the “copied” paper alerted the editor that, on verifying t… - Case
Multiple publication of research
We submit to COPE a case regarding the suspected multiple publication of research on four separate occasions in four different journals. Close inspection of the articles in question revealed that the author had directly copied and reused extensive sections of text, including tables in all four articles. After this matter was bought to the attention of the Editor of Journal A, the chronol… - Case
Duplicate publication
We are fortunate to have very knowledgeable reviewers who are immersed in their specialty and in the literature. A reviewer informed us that s(he) was working on a review of a manuscript and thought that there had to be more qualitative studies on this subject. S(he) began to look and found three articles not cited by the author and then a fourth. The fourth study was published in anothe… - Case
Unethical withdrawal of a paper
The terms author A and author B will be used to refer to the corresponding and non-corresponding authors, respectively, of the paper in question. The term Editor will be used for Editor A of our journal and Editor B of the other journal involved. The term Editorial Assistant will be used to refer to the person who is in charge of correspondence for our journal. Author A presented a paper… - Case
Repeated alleged plagiarism in case reports
Our journal has recently been the subject of an attack of attempted plagiarism by an author from a military hospital in another country. The first evidence of this was alerted to us by one of our reviewers who identified an almost word-for-word copy of a paper previously published in which the disease being treated was changed slightly and a few numbers but everything else, including the refere… - Case
Failure to ask permission
I am a trainer and author of books on medical writing. It was brought to my attention that a chapter in a German-language book published in Switzerland was based almost entirely on my teaching. The first author is director of a privately funded research institution and the second author a member of staff. The second author attended one of my courses. There is a general statement at the beginnin… - Case
A case of duplicate publication?
A paper was accepted and published in journal A which dealt with a cohort of patients with an unusual respiratory pathogen. A similar paper had been published in a US journal B a few months before. It dealt with more or less the same patients (a few more had been added) and provided some extra secondary outcome data but with the same conclusions. The editor of journal A considered this… - Case
A severe case of plagiarism?
A review article was submitted to the journal and sent for peer review. One of the reviewers brought to the editor’s attention that a substantial number of sentences and sections of the paper had directly, verbatim, been copied from chapter books and a monograph he had written in the past. The editor asked the reviewer to provide the texts in question. The editor carefully compared the submitte… - Case
An article in a high profile journal that potentially misappropriates research published in lower impact journals
It has been drawn to our attention that a paper published in a high-impact journal in the field of biological sciences (Journal A) draws very heavily on research published in the lower-impact factor journal for which we work (Journal B), as well as on work published in other journals. One of the authors of the paper in Journal B has contacted the editor of Journal A to register his/her concern… - Case
Availability of reagents
One of our journals has published several articles describing use of a particular cell line X, which belongs to company Y. The authors included employees of company Y. A reader at a university, Dr Z, wished to gain access to cell line X, and requested it from company Y. He was informed by the director of science of company Y that ‘...it is Y’s intention to keep control of the integrity of the X… - Case
A breach of intellectual property rights?
We recently published article A by author group X on our website ahead of print publication and subsequently received a formal complaint from author group Y alleging that the paper constitutes a breach of their intellectual property rights. Group Y state that the described work is based on a jointly developed concept, initially resulting in a joint report (published 2004). In their view,… - Case
A(uthor) vs C(omplainant) authorship dispute
A was a researcher in C’s lab for 1 year, during which time they published a joint research paper in a third party journal (journal S). After leaving C’s institute (henceforth called institute X), A published in the journal (journal T as a sole author). The affiliation provided by A on the paper was institute X. All of the data reported in this paper were obtained while A was still employed at… - Case
Confidentiality and consent in case reports
We would appreciate COPE Forum’s advice with regard to consent and confidentiality in the publication of case histories. Our journal is published three times a year and has a relatively small circulation but also goes to some postgraduate medical libraries, so is potentially available to a much wider audience. Our subscribers are doctors working with patients presenting with sexua…