- Case
Redundant publication by an editorial board member
A specialist journal received a paper for review. An editorial board member was one of the authors. The paper was sent out for review and one reviewer replied quite favourably. A few days later the reviewer sent the editor a copy of a paper seen in another journal that was very similar to the one under consideration, and by the same authors. It was the same population and the same study, just a… - Case
A falling out
A research letter was submitted from a team of investigators,A, B, C, and D. In their covering letter they reported that: A was involved in planning the study, collecting patient samples, and in writing the manuscript; B measured IL-10 polymorphisms and analysed the results; C was involved in supervising the measurement of polymorphisms and in writing the manuscript; D was involved in planning… - Case
Redundant publication
A paper was submitted to journal A which was published as a rapid communication. It was subsequently discovered that the major US journal in this specialty had published other findings from the same set of patients, and that the paper had been considered by them at the same time. The messages of the two papers are closely related but different, but either one could have been amalgamated into th… - Case
Attempted dual publication
A study by Japanese authors was submitted to specialist journal A. The manuscript was sent to three reviewers, including expert X. After two weeks, expert X contacted the editorial office to say that an identical manuscript had been sent by the competing specialist journal B to expert Y in the same unit as expert X. Expert X and expert Y had compared and discussed both manuscripts. Expert X sai… - Case
Partial disclosure of redundancy?
A reviewer detected that a paper received for review was almost identical to a paper published by the same group three years earlier in a journal of a different specialty. The paper concerned clinical and investigative aspects of a disease that crossed two specialties. Although the authors had included their previous paper in the reference list, the title of the paper had been changed from that… - Case
Duplication, revision and resubmission?
A manuscript was submitted which described the effect of a drug on cell turnover and apoptosis in a deletion mouse model of a common cancer. One of the reviewers noted that a very similar paper by the same authors had been published in another journal in the same specialty,and went to the trouble of underlining blocks of text that were identical in both papers. In one paper the authors had repo… - Case
Duplicate publication and now fraud?
Two articles were published in two different journals. The articles had been submitted within days of each other, and were subsequently peer reviewed, revised, and published within a month of each other. The authors failed to reference the closely related article as submitted or in press, and the editors of the two journals were unaware of the other article. After publication the editor… - Case
The double review
An author submitted a review to journal A in February 1997. It was accepted for publication in November, after peer review. The same author submitted a review on a similar topic—sufficiently similar that there was substantial overlap of content—to journal B in September 1997. Journal B accepted it in January 1998, after peer review. Neither journal editor knew of the parallel paper. Jou… - Case
Triplicate publication with possibly different data in each
A paper describing an outbreak of infectious disease was submitted to three journals. The submission to one journal described the index case; the submission to another included investigation and follow up of other cases and contacts in the country where the outbreak had occurred. The third paper looked at the spread of the disease into other countries. A considerable amount of the epidem… - Case
Grounds for retraction?
The co-author of a paper has contacted us about a paper he published 5 years ago together with a researcher who has now been convicted of serious professional misconduct by the GMC for research misconduct. The co-author is worried that the paper he co-authored may also be fraudulent. The research was in two parts. The first was analysed by a doctor not convicted of research miscon… - Case
Redundant publication?
The paper discussed the use of drug X in condition Y, submitted to journal A. It is a double blind randomised controlled trial, presenting the 1 year result in 129 women. It finds that drug X helps in condition Y. The authors published a similar paper in journal B, 2 months before submission of this paper to journal A. The journal B paper studied the same question in 601 women with a 2 year fo… - Case
Redundant publication
I received a letter from a reader in November 1997, pointing out that a paper published in the BMJ in 1996 was substantially the same as a paper published in another journal in 1994. We have examined both papers and discovered: (1) The papers describe the same cohort. There are the same numbers of patients, recruited in the same year; they have the same range of starting and finishing blood pr… - Case
Blatant example of duplicate publication?
A paper was submitted to one journal on 7 March, revised on 20 May, submitted to another journal on 21 March, revised on 29 May, accepted on 2 July and published in December 1997. The content of both papers is identical but each has different reference styles so were clearly intended for two different journals. The submission letter to the first journal clearly states that the material has not… - Case
The tortuous tale of a paper, a letter and an editorial
Dr A submitted an article to journal X that was published in 1996. Dr B wrote to the editor in January 1997, pointing out an error by Dr A. Shortly afterwards, Dr B submitted a longer editorial to the journal discussing the issue raised by this error in a much wider context. Dr B then withdrew the article and submitted it to journal Y at the end of March, with a covering letter in which he wrot… - Case
Attempted redundant publication?
Seven authors sent us a paper on hospital infections in children. We sent the paper to two reviewers, one of whom sent back a detailed comparison between the paper submitted to us and a paper published in another journal in 1996. The reviewer’s comments were: “Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that the study and its results have been published previously, comments with some further… - Case
Disagreement between a reviewer and an author
We sent a paper to a reviewer, who suggested that we should reject the paper, principally because he thought it “virtually identical to a paper in press by the same authors”. We rejected the paper with these comments. The author came back to us saying that he did not believe that he had had a fair review of his paper because, he thought, the reviewer had a conflict of interest. He wrote: “The…