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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 121–140 of 150 results
  • Case

    Russian scientific misconduct

    A letter was sent to an editor, claiming that scientific misconduct had taken place in Russia. The editor did not want to ignore the issue, which was not related to submitted papers and could not be published as a letter. But s/he was unsure what action to take. … This would be best pursued as an investigative news story.…
  • Case

    Dispute over plagiarism

    A review article, written by two authors, was spontaneously submitted to Journal X and accepted for publication after favourable comments from the referees. A few weeks later, and before the paper had been published, Author A withdrew authorship because he could not guarantee the originality of the text. Apparently, Author A had recently discovered that another review paper, co-authored with th…
  • Case

    Plagiarism in a review article

    A review article was spontaneously submitted and sent out to three peer reviewers, which is standard practice for the journal. One of these reviewers expressed “serious concerns” about the paper. In a telephone conversation, s/he explained that the structure (headings, subheadings, etc), large “chunks of the text,” and most of the references had been plagiarised from a teaching syllabus that s/…
  • Case

    Possible malpractice revealed in a case report

    We received a case report describing the diagnosis and treatment of a middle-aged woman who presented to a gastroenterology service in England with weight loss and a right iliac fossa mass. The authors did a barium swallow, duodenal and gastric biopsies, and diagnosed Crohn’s disease by the radiological appearances on follow-through. They did not do a colonoscopy, or biopsy the mass in the term…
  • Case

    Dispute between authors and a reviewer

    A concise report on a rare disease was submitted and sent out to an internationally renowned reviewer in the field. He felt that some of the data had been obtained in his unit, and this had not been acknowledged by the authors. The authors responded that the tests had been performed in their own laboratory, but that the scans had indeed been done elsewhere. The editor suggested that perhaps the…
  • Case

    Multiple submissions of a paper

    A paper suggested that a cluster of symptoms, signs, and tests could be combined to diagnose pneumonia in general practice. The paper was rejected after being read by two editors, because it was preliminary and had not been validated in an independent population. The authors submitted a new manuscript the following year, describing the same patients and focusing on the accuracy of individual sy…
  • Case

    Attempts to draw attention to potential duplicate publication

    A medical student brought a case of duplicate publication in two journals in the same specialty to the attention of an editor of a third journal. The article in Journal A was published in 1997 and the article in Journal B was published in 1999. The editor wrote to both journals and asked them to investigate. The editor wrote several times over two years before he retired. The editor received a…
  • Case

    Wholesale plagiarism

    A review article was submitted by three authors from three separate institutions to Journal A. It was sent out to two referees. One of the referees noticed an apparent similarity with a review published a year earlier in Journal B, but written by two completely different authors. An electronic copy of the published article from Journal B's website indicated that the whole of the submitted manus…
  • Case

    Duplicate publication in a foreign language

    A published article was subsequently republished in a foreign language journal, with exactly the same results and text. Just a few extra references were added. The senior author had written to apologise for the foreign language publication, but argued that the second publication was a different paper. But the editor disagreed: the foreign language publication had not referenced the origi…
  • Case

    The disgraced author

    An editorial was commissioned from a distinguished doctor who was subsequently found guilty of research misconduct overseas. There was a lack of consensus in the journal’s country as to whether this judgment was correct. The author continues to work, but is awaiting a judgment from his regulatory body. - Should the editorial be published? - Should the editorial be published with a footnote refe…
  • Case

    Going public on potential fraud

    A research article published some time ago detailed an invasive test. The authors obtained informed consent from the patients, but did not seek ethics committee approval. Subsequently, the journal published correspondence from X, detailing the article’s problems. X and others had attempted to replicate the study and had failed to achieve the accuracy levels as described. X stated that this was…
  • Case

    An attempt to bribe an editor

    Somebody—possibly a representative of a drug company or a PR acting for the company—rang an editor on behalf of study authors to say that she would guarantee to buy 1000 reprints if the journal would continue to consider for publication a study that conflicted with a policy that the journal had just introduced. “And”, she said, “I will buy you a dinner at any restaurant you choose.” The paper w…
  • Case

    Dual publication

    It was brought to the attention of Journal A that a paper published in 2002 was similar (title, summary, introduction, case, survey, results, discussion) to a paper published in Journal B. Journal A is a very technical journal that reports conference proceedings and is not peer reviewed. Furthermore, Journal B had received a letter from the authors of another paper, published in a very prestigi…
  • Case

    Allegation of reviewer malpractice

    A member of the editorial board of Journal A was approached by an overseas colleague with a strange tale. An epidemiological study had been conducted in the community around an industrial facility, funded by a group of plaintiffs’ lawyers. The study concluded that health effects in the community were related to exposures emanating from the facility. A paper based on the study was submitted to J…
  • Case

    Duplicate publication

    Sixteen randomly chosen papers were examined from a PubMed search of 370 publications between 1995–2000 by the same author. Two papers were virtually identical, differing only in the form of the introductory paragraph and the list of authors. Neither publication acknowledges the other. Another paper reported a “second ever published case”, and two subsequent papers reported the same “second” ca…
  • Case

    Redundant publication

    Journal A received letters from two readers pointing out that the female component of a cohort the paper published was identical with that in a paper published in Journal B earlier that year. The two papers were sent to two independent reviewers, one of whom felt that there was a great degree of overlap between the two papers. The other agreed, but suggested that the paper submitted to Journal…
  • Case

    Authorship without the author’s knowledge

    A paper was rejected on the reviewer’s recommendation. The editor met one of the senior authors at a conference and out of politeness apologised for rejecting his paper. He was surprised to learn that the senior author had no knowledge of this paper and that the corresponding author had written papers using the senior author’s name without his knowledge in the past. This prompted the editor to…
  • Case

    A paper which discloses confidential material

    In March 2000 author A submitted a research letter to journal X, on behalf of a national screening programme. He also submitted a commissioned editorial to journal Y, relating to the same subject. At the same time, author A sent copies of both articles to B, a recognised authority on the subject. He made it clear that they were confidential and in press and asked for some information on a test…
  • Case

    Reviewer submitting for publication material that had been removed from a paper he had reviewed

    The paper was sent to two reviewers and published after modification. Between acceptance and publication, some modelling that had been included in the original paper was removed. Some time after publication one of the people who had reviewed the study submitted a letter for publication that included this model. The original authors were rather surprised by this and they sent us a letter pointin…
  • Case

    Authorship dispute

    An article was published with three authors’ names. Not all of the authors’ signatures had been included on the original submission letter. A complaint was lodged by Y, who said that X had submitted the paper without either his or Z’s consent or knowledge, and that there were several specific errors and omissions. Y then submitted a statement for publication in the journal dissociating himself…

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