- CaseOn-going
Authorship dispute
…after author A left the research collaboration. Further questions to COPE: Author B stated that author A committed plagiarism and requested that the paper must be retracted. There is considerable evidence that plagiarism may have occurred by author A. What would the COPE suggest we do?… - CaseCase Closed
Reviewer requesting addition of multiple citations of their own work
…reviewer has only one academic affiliation, however it is with an institution that has been previously found to offer financial incentives to Clarivate’s highly cited researchers in exchange for the researcher’s agreement to include an affiliation to their institution in future publications. The reviewer is self-employed, thus without an institutional employer, and the editorial team have no direct… - Case
Retraction or correction?
…href="https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts/plagiarism-published-article"> the COPE flowchart for suspected plagiarism in a published article. It would seem that the editors find the response from the authors insufficient and unsatisfactory, and it is clear from the flowchart what the next recommended steps should be. If the editor believes that the omission was not intentional, the authors could be allowed to fix the oversight. The editor could let… - Case
Duplicate publication
…The American editor has now written to the senior author of the received manuscript requesting an explanation for this attempt at duplicate publication. To date no response has been received. He, together with other senior editors in the United States, has already published an editorial stating that plagiarism or proven duplicate publication would be punished by denying the individuals concerned… - CaseCase Closed
Duplicate publication allegation
…experiment. The extended abstract in B was not. When we contacted the editor of journal B, we were informed that they had received several such complaints from Clare Francis which have turned out to be somewhat spurious. A simple Google search revealed that 'Clare Francis' is a widely known self-styled whistleblower in scientific publication. We responded that we had looked in detail at both… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship dispute during the review process
…the paper. We asked Dr Y to confirm whether the author list on the paper was complete and to provide us with funding details. Dr Y replied that there were no other authors, and that the work was completely self-funded. Question(s) for the COPE Forum Should the journal contact the author's institution (and/or the supervisor's institution) to investigate?… - CaseCase Closed
Increased number of casual submissions
…without following even basic principles of scientific writing and publication ethics. The incidence of plagiarism and potential compromise of publication ethics is increasing. Increased numbers of submissions of such poorly written casual submissions take substantial time and resources, adding a lot of pressure to the editorial process. We believe some of the reasons why this is happening… - CaseCase Closed
Critical comment and conflict of interest
…multiple cases of plagiarism and recycling fraud found in their works. In addition, earlier in the year in which Article 1 had been published, Dr Y was informed that an allegation of scientific fraud in regard to one of their own papers in Journal B had been made to their institution by Dr X. As a result, Dr Y could not publicly engage in a criticism of Dr X or their work as the case was still pending.… - CaseCase Closed
Sanctions for citation cartels?
…citations and that the scholarly content within them is minimal (to date, no indications of plagiarism have been found). The peer review for these issues was done ‘off-system’ and despite the publisher requesting copies of all peer review reports, they have yet to receive them (peer review ‘off-system’ is no longer allowed—these issues were published some years ago). To date, expressions of… - CaseOn-going
Conflicts of interest between authors and editors
…the managing editor and academic editor make initial checks on all submissions. The managing editor conducts a check for plagiarism and reviews the manuscript for suitability according to journal scope and appropriate format. If they pass this initial check manuscripts are assigned to an academic editor after disclosing any conflicts of interest (CoI) (there is a checklist for this as part of the… - CaseOn-going
Ethics approval for survey design
…acknowledged they chose to collect data prior to IRB submission and approval under the pandemic circumstances, with a self-determination they were following the requirements of the Helsinki Declaration and no other documented ethical or human subjects’ review prior to data collection was apparent. The journal often receives manuscripts of survey results intended for an internal organisation needs… - CaseCase Closed
Disclosure and transparency issue
…that the editor cannot make a decision on this—it is the responsibility of the authors and their institution. The advice was to contact the institution and ask them to resolve the issue. The editor might want to consider contacting this person directly, rather than liaising through the corresponding author, and asking this person directly about his/her contribution. Self declarations of… - CaseOn-going
A case of salami slicing
…methods of the journal to filter out possible cases of plagiarism and salami slicing. The editor discussed the case (without revealing any of the author's details) with editors of related journals who said that they also experienced similar cases and expressed the need for efforts to create awareness to avoid publication misconduct. The editor acknowledges the guidance from the COPE website in… - CaseCase Closed
Was this study unethical?
…committee of the researchers’ institution. Data were collected in a school setting by self-reported questionnaire and interviews. Children were classified according to amount of SHS exposure and baseline data about several types of symptoms were collected. The children with the symptom of interest and exposed to SHS were then randomly divided into two groups. Smoking members of families in group 1 were… - CaseOn-going
Same cohort - same blood samples - multiple tests
This is a hypothetical situation based on a real-life experience. A set of authors recruited the same patient cohort, collected data with two questionnaires, took one blood sample, but tests were done by two research students for two pathogens, and the results were presented separately in two theses. Subsequently, they sent different papers to two journals. No plagiarism has been… - CaseCase Closed
Unusually frequent submission of articles by a single author
A sixth year medical student, with expected year of graduation of 2013 (Mr X), submitted 29 original articles and 17 letters to the editor in the period February 2012 to October 2012 to our journal. This amounted to an average of five submissions per month. Mr X is an author and corresponding author in every article. Of these, he is the first author of eight original research articles and 12 le… - CaseCase Closed
Request to remove author from submitted manuscript due to academic misconduct
…initial steps of the current COPE flowchart for removing an author before publication. This flowchart only refers back to more strict instances of scientific fraud or misconduct such as plagiarism or ghost/gift writing, so that it is not clear whether it would be even fair to initiate… - CaseCase Closed
Two cases of double submission
Journal A is dealing with two separate cases of double submission: Case 1: Manuscript X was submitted to the journal. Two rounds of revision were suggested by the editor in charge, following comments by the referee, and an amended version was submitted. Following routine plagiarism detection checking, the editorial team found that a substantial part of the manuscript was similar to…