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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 481–500 of 780 results
  • Case

    Studies where there is no research ethics committee, or where committees disagree as to the need for approval

    The editor of this journal, in common with other journals, requires that, where appropriate, studies published should have been approved by the relevant ethics committee. In some cases researchers have reported to the editor that they have found no committee willing to accept competence, or that different committees are taking different lines on which studies require approval. As an exam…
  • Case

    Effect of the British Human Tissue Acts on biological monitoring

    Biological monitoring is a common procedure in assessing the dose of contaminants from a workplace atmosphere.  It may include measuring a contaminant, such as lead in blood, or a resulting metabolic product, such as mandelic acid in urine following styrene exposure. A related process is using adhesive tape to strip the surface layer of a small area of skin to measure the dermal deposit.  Clear…
  • Case

    Confidentiality and privacy issue

    A manuscript was submitted from UK authors. The study was a case series of infants with a particular condition. A table in the manuscript contains descriptive data which are critically important for the readers with respect to understanding the risk of this condition in young infants and the likelihood of abuse. The question is whether this table violates the law with respect to confiden…
  • 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

    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

    Declaration of contributorship

    An online post-publication literature evaluation service, aiming to highlight the best articles in medicine, received an evaluation of an article whose authors were based at the same institution as the evaluator. The editor asked the contributor if he/she had any involvement in the study and received the following response: “I am based at the university but did not participate in the design of…
  • Case

    Lack of patient consent for a case report, patient confidentiality

    A case report was submitted to journal X reporting on a child who had been admitted to hospital suffering an injury, which the doctors suspected resulted from a deliberate cigarette burn. This was not proved until the child returned to hospital with other non-accidental injuries, and following a full criminal investigation the child’s parents were convicted of child abuse. Patient consen…
  • 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

    Competing interest issue

    An online post-publication literature evaluation service, aiming to highlight the best articles in medicine, received an evaluation of an article on which the evaluator was listed as an author on PubMed. The editor queried the evaluation and the evaluator replied explaining s/he had no involvement with the study but had commented on it. When the editor looked at the full text HTML version on th…
  • 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

    Prolific authors

    We have noticed some authors who are publishing at a rate that is exceptionally high. (1) An author of a recent submission has published over 100 articles since January 2005; he had published fewer than 50 in the preceding 5 years. This is quite a sudden increase. On average, he published 1 article every 8 days in 2005, and in 2006 this increased to 1 every 4 days. The author is on the b…
  • Case

    Suspected financial fraud

    An editorial board member received a complaint of suspected financial fraud in the working of a particular journal and was presented with limited evidence of the same. The editorial board member was invited by the editor to serve on the board and has just completed his tenure. The fraud has apparently been committed by the editor himself. Is there any ethical binding on the editorial boa…
  • Case

    Editorial misconduct

    An associate editor received a letter claiming harassment (from an author from another country) by the editor. The author submitted a manuscript which was repeatedly sent back for changes in format but not rejected. Eventually, the author withdrew the article and submitted it to another international peer reviewed journal with a good impact factor where it was accepted immediately with high pri…
  • Case

    No ethics approval or informed consent?

    A thesis published by a student was submitted by his guide for publication. One of the journal editors found the research unethical and asked for confirmation of ethics committee approval. The editor received a verbal commitment that the approval had been given prior to the research being started and the approval letter would be submitted in due course. However, on further investigation by the…
  • Case

    Competing interests question

    An online post-publication literature evaluation service aiming to highlight the best papers in medicine, received an evaluation of a basic science study funded by an NIHM grant. The evaluator declared in his/her competing interests that he/she is the director of a project that included the evaluated study as one of its components. The overall project was funded by an NIHM grant and paid the sa…
  • Case

    Ethical approval for a study

    We had a presubmission enquiry from a group regarding a paper reporting what seemed to be an uncontrolled trial in infertile women who were given soft tissue physical therapy. The authors wanted to know if we would be interested in their paper; if it was a problem that the trial had not been registered (because, they claimed, it was not a trial as no control group was used); and if it was a pro…
  • Case

    Literature evaluation service and supplements

    An online post-publication literature evaluation service aiming to highlight the best articles in medicine has received evaluation of articles published in supplement issues of journals. Given that many supplements are funded by pharmaceutical companies, should we have a different policy on how to handle such evaluations? If so, what suggestions do you have? … The committee felt that it is…
  • 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

    Suspected plagiarism

    This is regarding a case of suspected plagiarism in our journal. I as editor have received a manuscript which was published by me in our January 2006 issue and on subsequent follow up after availability of plagiarism detection software the manuscript - a review article - seems to have a lot of similarities to another article written in a website and though the language is not the same -the flow…

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