- CaseCase Closed
Does co-publication of an editorial constitute duplicate publication?
…editorial. Transparent notification of the simultaneous and duplicate publication in each article is key, as well as the texts being identical. The main problems with duplicate publication (and the attendant harms) are: the risk of misleading an audience; the risk of duplicate counting of the same patient data in subsequent systematic reviews/meta-analyses, with the attendant harm of… - CaseCase Closed
Use of secondary data without proper attribution
Journal A received a paper on a cross sectional study from six coauthors. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Two months later, a clinician contacted the journal and said that the material was taken from their thesis submitted to the same institution six years previously. The corresponding author explained that the data were obtained from a large institution database and… - CaseCase Closed
Data availability for vulnerable populations
A paper on a vulnerable population was published in a journal. The journal followed their usual procedures for processing papers on vulnerable populations, by requesting and reviewing further information on the ethics approval and consent procedures of the study (e.g.: recruitment procedures; blank version of the consent document participants read and signed; the study protocol that was… - CaseCase Closed
Removing a retracted article from a third party site
We followed the Forum’s guidance and sought legal advice, including a review of our guidance to authors on consent for case reports. We requested to have the result on website Z de-indexed from search engines. We sent a takedown notice to the copyright agent of website Z under their DMCA policy. We consider the case still open as the content has not been removed. Update - CaseOn-going
Change of corresponding author after manuscript published online
On submission of a manuscript to a journal, one of the authors was indicated as the corresponding author. During the submission, review, and revision process, and also through copyediting and proofreading, the corresponding author responded to all emails, signed the publishing agreements, and was generally available. At this time, the authors of the manuscript did not mention a possible change… - CaseOn-going
Unethical private practice
This single author manuscript describes the treatment of 300 women with psychological problems. The women were randomised to either therapy or pharmacological intervention, and this study reports the relative effectiveness of these strategies. At submission, the manuscript did not contain any mention of ethics approval, consent or trial registration. When the author was queried on these… - CaseCase Closed
No ethics committee approval of a study
Our journal received a manuscript describing a comparison of two different techniques for patients in the intensive care unit. There was no information on ethics committee approval and so we asked the authors if approval was obtained. They replied that they had not applied for ethics committee approval “as it was a clinical comparison of two existing methods, none of them experimental. All pati… - Case
Retract, correct, or both?
…a review of patients of a particular type, undergoing a particular treatment, so it does not claim that treatment X is better than treatment Y although it might contribute to treatment decisions in terms of counselling/offering that treatment to these patients—thus does have clinical implications.… - Case
HIV homeopathy
The authors carried out a study. A homeopathic treatment was given to people with HIV/AIDs. The outcome was quality of life, as measured by a questionnaire after 1 month and 18 months of treatment. Participants were selected for inclusion if they had a HIV seropositive status at the time of study and were not taking any other kind of HIV/AIDs treatment. The participants were stratified i… - Case
Plagiarism in a case report
…& Education at Author A’s institution summarising the situation and informing us that Author A has been asked to step down from some of his responsibilities while his other publications and research activities are investigated. In this letter, it was also pointed out that most of the discussion in the 2005 case report had been duplicated from a review article published previously in our journal by… - Case
Should we always follow the decisions of ethics committees?
A paper was submitted to our journal describing a study in which children received general anaesthesia for a minor operation. The authors chose to induce anaesthesia with a mask and 8% sevoflurane inhalation for 8 minutes. The aim was to study the EEG over various brain areas to see where the epileptogenic activity is located. The reason for doing the study was that it has been sho… - Case
Community leaders’ consent as a proxy for individual consent
A study was submitted that reported the prevalence of an intestinal infection in a tribal community. The authors did not obtain informed individual consent for stool collection from the study participants; instead they obtained consent from the leaders of each village. The study protocol was approved by the national IRB, but the protocol made no specific mention of stool collection—it referred… - Case
Ethical approval for retrospective study
A paper reported the clinical outcomes of patients suffering from a neglected disease before and after a change in the national treatment policy which raised the threshold of one laboratory parameter before a more toxic, but more effective drug could be used. The authors did a retrospective cohort study of patients treated under both policies, to see how this change affected outcomes. They did… - Case
Arm twisting an editor
…caution. The editor believed the real message was that the database concerned was an inadequate method of determining safety in the area it purported to cover, rather than the stated message, which was that certain adverse reactions had caused deaths. Concerned that the pressure exerted had tainted his judgement, the editor sought the advice of an independent reviewer, who largely agreed with him. The… - CaseOn-going
Dealing with cases with culturally offensive content
…journal and publisher teams should be involved in making moral judgements on article content and the extent to which they need to review their entire back catalogue for consistency in their response. There are also definitional issues in determining whether past publications should now be deemed offensive, and whether this involved flawed methodologies, potential societal harm, or interpretation or… - CaseCase Closed
Should we allow pseudonymous authorship?
We are handling a manuscript that is now ready for acceptance. During the review process we noticed that one coauthor had the surname "999" and this coauthor and two others had the affiliation "Independent researcher". We asked the corresponding author what this meant. Their answer was that the names of two of these three authors, including "999", were pseudonyms. The paper was based on… - CaseCase Closed
Dual submission and editor’s failure to take action
An article was submitted to our journal (journal A) in March. According to the journal’s working policy, the article was initially reviewed inhouse and comments were sent to the author. The authors replied to the comments but did not agree to the suggestion to convert the article to a short report. A rather impolite letter was sent by the author criticising the policies of the journal. We sent… - CaseOn-going
Stolen article
…reviewers and editor are not the authors of article B. The authors of article A said they spoke with the first author of article B, who promised to withdraw it. Article B was retracted, with the abstract being removed and a retraction notice posted. However, the stated reason for retraction was errors. The authors of article A said they were surprised by this. What we know appears to be… - CaseCase Closed
Request to withdraw as an author of an accepted but unpublished paper
The editor updated the Forum by telling them that PD had provided him with a copy of the email from AP’s institutional panel saying that after careful review of the evidence, the panel unanimously reached the conclusion that allegations of misconduct against PD were not merited and no further proceedings were warranted. Also, AP emailed the editor and requested that the manuscript be… - CaseClosed: author misconduct
Duplicate publication and alleged image manipulation
…and asking for a response/explanation. The author freely admitted to the duplicate publication and paper 1 is in the process of being retracted. The allegation against paper 2 was image manipulation consisting of false bands being included in an assay figure. The editorial office reviewed the images and believes that they have been manipulated. As such they would like to retract the paper…