- Case
Plagiarism
A review article by an expert group plagiarised an article from another journal. It was largely a direct translation, involving large slabs of the text. Some of the authors are on the editorial board of the journal where the paper was published. There was no declaration that this was a translation of another article. … The editor is potentially in a very difficult situati… - Case
Sanitising a misleading statement
Author A published a paper in Journal X, which presented evidence of failure by another research group to declare a serious conflict of interest in a paper that had been published some years before in Journal Y. This conflict of interest centred around the undeclared involvement of a third party with a vested interest. Evidence for this was presented in the form of correspondence from the third… - Case
Misunderstood requirements for authorship
Dr X submitted a paper to a journal that was assigned by a rather hung-over editorial assistant to an associate editor who was a co-author on the paper. Realising the mistake, she emailed the associate editor to reassign the paper. He expressed surprise as he did not know Dr X, had not seen the paper before submission, and knew of no reason why he should be a co-author. Dr X was asked to… - Case
Competing interest
An editorial board member of a journal submitted an unsolicited review article on a drug. The editor said the journal would consider the article, but suspected that the article had been commissioned or even written by a drugs company. S/he stipulated that the author must provide a financial disclosure statement before the article could be accepted. The journal published the review article, whic… - 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
Anonymous information
We have received an allegation from an anonymous phone caller that an author has been wrongly omitted from a Viewpoint published 2 years ago. The claim was made that the author's contribution was suppressed by the institution. Should we act on such information? And if yes, what should we do? … The editor should contact the named person who had allegedly been left off. … We did… - Case
Potentially unethical publication
A new Editor was appointed to a society journal in a minority medical specialty. An officer of the society immediately handed him an anonymous letter from a reader of the journal complaining that an article recently published was unethical. The Editor is a personal friend both of the previous editor who accepted the paper, and the author of the paper. The paper is by a single author who gives n… - Case
Retraction of false authorship
Dr X asked for a statement to be published to the effect that the letter he had published in the journal with two co-authors was not based on any work that he had done, but on that of his colleagues. The editor asked the other two authors why they had signed a copyright form in these circumstances. Both authors stated that they had not signed any such form, and when presented with a copy, state… - Case
The disappearing authors
Some time after a single authored research article was published a journal received a letter pointing out that the same article had been rejected by another journal because of unresolved authorship and acknowledgement issues. At that time the paper had 12 authors. The correspondent said that the single author had a patent application related to the topic of the paper. This was declared as a com… - Case
Authorship dispute
A paper submitted to an international medical journal was reviewed externally and the authors were subsequently invited to submit a revised version. The initial submission included authors from two different research institutions and one author from a corporate sponsor. The initial submission was accompanied by an appropriate description of the individual authors’ contributions, a negative conf… - Case
An accusation of fraud in a rejected paper
A paper was reviewed by two referees. The associate editor dealing with it recommended rejection as both reviews were critical of the methods, results, and reproducibility of the experiment. After the authors were informed, the editor-in-chief received an email from someone in the same laboratory, expressing relief that the manuscript had been rejected. The writer went on to say that s/he had m… - Case
A patient was given an experimental course of complementary medicine when a standard treatment was available
A case report was submitted to a journal, describing a patient with a very serious, curable infectious disease who had been given complementary medicine (plant extract) rather than the standard treatment. A search of the literature indicated that the authors were known to support complementary therapies. The alternative treatment was not evidence based. The case took place in a country were the… - Case
Order of authors changing between a submitted manuscript and a published paper
A paper was submitted to an online journal with the order of authors A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. After review, the manuscript was accepted for publication, subject to the authors making some minor changes. While making the formatting changes, the submitting author changed the order of the authors to B, A, C, D, E, F, G. This change was not noticed by the editors and the manuscript was published on… - Case
The author not affiliated to an institution
A contribution about training in family medicine training was published in a journal. Subsequently, a letter from the chairman of the department of family medicine at the university with which the author claimed to have been affiliated, said that the author did not work there. The author was asked for an explanation. He replied that he had done it involuntarily and that he would be happy for an… - Case
Arm twisting an editor
A paper was accepted, pending a revised version, which made use of official government information on reported health reactions in a particular age group over a 20 year period. Two of the authors were academics and two worked for the government’s health department. When the revision arrived, the names of the latter two authors were missing. One of them explained that they could not reach agreem… - Case
Late reinterpretation and a new author
Authors A, B, and C submitted a paper about the behaviour of a group of doctors. All the authors came from one institution, where the doctors’ behaviour had been studied. Author A did the data collection under the supervision of author B, who was obviously responsible for the design of the study and acted as guarantor. Author C was an official at the institution. The journal accepted it after r… - Case
Plagiarism
On review of a paper for Journal A, a referee recognised entire paragraphs of the manuscript from two published review articles that he himself had written. Both reviews were referenced in the manuscript with regard to particular topics, but the verbatim paragraphs were not attributed to the previously published reviews. The editor rejected the paper and pointed out the apparent plagiarism to t… - Case
Stolen data and omission from the authorship list
An author wrote to the editor of a specialist journal, indicating that a paper had been published without appropriate recognition of himself as an author. In his letter he stated that he had contributed more than 50% of the cases reported. The first author had “not only stolen my data and published it without my consent, but also omitted my name. ” The editor has written to the authors of the p… - Case
Redundant publication and a question of authorship
A paper was reviewed and subsequently published in December 1999. A further publication with an almost identical title, but with different authors, was published in another journal in 2000. It is quite clear both papers relate to the same study, and apart from some minor differences in style, which were probably requested by the editorial offices, they seem to be identical. The editor of the se… - Case
Duplicate publication
An author published a paper in Journal A that looked extremely similar to one already published as guidelines in Journal B. Of 48 paragraphs of text, 41 were almost identical. It has since transpired that several authors who were involved in the writing of the article published in Journal B have not been acknowledged. Prior publication elsewhere had not been acknowledged in the Journal A paper.…