- CaseCase Closed
Parental consent for participants
The reviews for the article were returned and the article was rejected based on the merit of the paper. The matter regarding this specific submission is closed. The authors followed the letter of the law in their country, but the editor still wonders if there should be a universal age for consent of minors, without parental approval. There are many sides to the issue.… - CaseCase Closed
Alleged misuse of confidential information
…submission independently replicated the mapping data of the earlier paper and proceeded to identify the gene by exome sequencing, a technology that had become widely available since the publication of the mapping paper in 2006. Since the mapping was independently replicated, the methodology used would have been sufficient to identify the gene whether any prior knowledge was available or not. Author… - CaseCase Closed
Correcting errors versus privileged information
…grounds that it was far too long and contained redundant and unnecessary material. One reviewer (B) invited a revised version. A second round of review led to the suggestion by reviewer D, that BCD publish an erratum acknowledging the errors uncovered by the submission, together with a further comment from author A. The handling editor in turn proposed that author A and authors BCD submit a joint… - CaseCase Closed
Authorship order dispute
The Forum raised the question that since Dr F has a conflict of interest (as an author), should he be acting as a mediator? All agreed that the paper cannot be published until this authorship issue is resolved. The advice was to contact the other authors and ask for their opinions. The Forum advised that to avoid a similar situation in the future, after submission, all authors should be copied… - CaseClosed: author misconduct
Question of paper retraction due to proven fabricated data
…errors in the trial call the study’s reliability into question. Provides transcript of relevant court ruling. This makes it clear that the author became an expert witness in February 2007, after publication of paper but before submission of the letter. He clearly became an expert witness on the basis of the study. Transcript says that author acknowledges inaccuracies—11 of 27 patients who originally… - Case
Pedigree descriptions: genotyping results for family members
We received a paper which describes genotyping results from a large number of individuals (>50) from five unrelated families, in which family members had various blood and liver conditions. On submission we noted that the paper included specific details regarding the clinical histories of individuals in each family. Some individuals were described in substantial detail, others only briefly.… - Case
Possible serial misconduct in relation to coauthors and other activities
…the work from a scientific perspective made it clear it was not acceptable for publication and I have informed the author of this. The author has two other manuscripts in submission and I have requested documented confirmation that the listed coauthors of these approve of their content. Furthermore, my attention has been drawn to items in four other journals raising issues about coauthors’ approval… - Seminars and webinars
Webinar 2020: Understanding text recycling
…some of those we couldn't get to, after the webinar: 1. If a publisher requires you to sign a document that your submission is original and has not been published elsewhere, doesn't this require that any recycled text must be cited? Great question, with no clear answer. This is one of the major issues we are working on in developing our new model text recycling… - CaseCase Closed
Publication of correspondence relating to a paper currently online
…one has been submitted as a full letter via the journal’s manuscript submission and tracking system. Questions for COPE Council Would COPE encourage the journal to publish the comments and letters received to date? Or should the journal continue to hold them until a resolution has been reached about the article itself? … - CaseOn-going
Institution wants to retract despite ongoing legal proceedings
…publication of article A and before publication of article B, a senior colleague of author A at institution A contacted publisher A asking for article A to be retracted. The claimant said author A had left institution A after the submission to journal A but before publication. The claimant alleged that author A used other researchers’ data without permission and used the affiliation without approval… - CaseOn-going
Authors’ contributions and involvement by medical communications company
…consideration by the journal. On submission, the authors declared language editing assistance by this company, but not developmental editing. The cover letter included several inaccuracies about the work reported in the manuscript. After being queried about these errors, the authors acknowledged that they followed a template for the cover letter provided by the company and that it was their first time writing… - Case
Sanitising a misleading statement
…because this no longer appeared in the revised manuscript. Author A’s response however, did reference the contradictory evidence, in the process of reiterating that the research group had failed to establish that the third party had not been involved in their original paper. Journal X then accepted both submissions. But the research group withdrew their reply, compelling the withdrawal of Author… - CaseOn-going
Rescind a decision post-acceptance prior to publication
…dataset or research ethics are questionable because of a retraction elsewhere involving the same study, or there has been duplicate or salami publishing. If the authors did not declare that their other article was under investigation this would be a failure to disclose information that ‘would have unduly affected interpretations of the work or recommendations by editors and peer reviewers,’ which is… - CaseOn-going
Fraud or sloppiness in a submitted manuscript
…illustrating the procedure in both manuscripts are identical. The reference list is identical. I can think of only two ways to make sense of this submission: sloppiness or fraud. Under the sloppiness assumption, the authors would have submitted a text referring to their randomised control trial and tables, referring to an earlier observational study. This is conceivable mostly because it is hard to… - Case
The ethics of drug/medication use evaluation audit cycles and publication of the results
…although this is not clear. The manuscript was rejected on a number of grounds, mainly relating to questions of methodology and partly related to the question of publishing a small subset of a much larger set of data (also to be published eventually according to the website of the national project). The submission did, however, raise other ethical questions that remain a matter of some debate… - Case
Author dispute over data presented in paper
A manuscript was submitted to our Journal in 2008. The six authors signed the author form for the Journal which accompanies all submitted manuscripts. The author form gives information on the role each author played in the study and states that each author has read and approved the paper for submission to the Journal. Following peer-review the paper was accepted for publication. It was… - Case
An authorship dispute and a question about when a paper is considered published
…they should agree authorship prior to submission but in this case Authors A and B claim that Author C is not an author so that they have nothing to agree.… - CaseCase Closed
Editor and reviewers requiring authors to cite their own work
The journal is working on implementing additional steps in the submission process to prevent similar issues in the future. The editor considers the case closed. Related resource Spanish version: El editor y los revisores solicitan que se cite su… - Case
Author did not see reviews or revisions to the manuscript and did not give approval for publication
The Forum were reassured that the paper had been dealt with blindly, and so there was no issue of misconduct on the part of the editor-in-chief. The Forum suggested that for online submissions, the editor should ensure that the email addresses of all authors are recorded. Some journals, including the BMJ, copy in all authors when contacting the corresponding… - Case
The judgement of Solomon: a case of two strikingly similar papers
…of his paper. His case was that paper A reported a study that had been presented at a conference in April 2007. He thought that one or more of the authors of paper B might have reviewed his paper for the conference the previous November, and had used it to design an identical study. He claimed that paper B showed evidence of having been “rushed into submission”. We contacted the…