You are here

Guidance

Filter by topic

Filter by resource type

Showing 801–820 of 1061 results
  • Case

    Authorship dispute

    The paper in question describes a collaborative study of several datasets (not all previously published). A putative referee was asked to review the paper and declined. However, this led to a written complaint asserting that (s)he should be an author as (s)he had made a significant contribution to some of the work described in the paper. After promising comments from referees, the existi…
  • Case

    Misuse of post-publication literature evaluation service

    An online post-publication literature evaluation service that publishes only positive reviews, aiming to highlight the best papers in medicine, received an evaluation of a paper that had been published in a journal for which the evaluator of the paper acts as editor in chief. The evaluator did not declare any competing interests but the editor dealing with the evaluation knew about his/her role…
  • Case

    A case of plagiarism

    A paper with five authors was submitted from a university hospital in a Middle-Eastern country. One of the reviewers complained that it extensively plagiarised one of his own publications. Examination showed that about 30% of the text and tables had been copied. The results were original, and in some cases had simply been slotted into the plagiarised text. The paper was rejected by email…
  • Case

    Dual submission

    Paper 1 was submitted to journal A. The paper dealt with monitoring of a chemical element in various occupations in a range of workplaces. Samples were taken from the workplace air and bodily fluids of the workers, and conclusions were drawn about what metabolite should be measured in order to estimate a worker’s dose of the element. The chosen reviewers were experts in relevant biological moni…
  • Case

    Ethical approval and parental consent

    A journal received a paper from a single author, attributed to a UK institution, in which 10 children were operated on using two techniques, each child having one technique to one side and one to the other side, at the same operation. The paper went to review, and neither reviewer spotted that this was a prospective surgical study on children, with no mention of consent or ethical approv…
  • Case

    Author’s name removed from submitted article

    A week after receiving a paper on a study for consideration for publication, the Editor received an email from person X claiming to have been the principal investigator of the study for the previous five years, up until he recently parted company in acrimonious circumstances from the hospital Trust in receipt of the NHS R&D funding for the study. Person X sent supporting evidence of his inv…
  • 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

    Problem with figures

    (1) An article was published after peer review. Shortly after online publication we received a message from a reader (an academic who works in the same field as the authors) notifying us of a major concern with one of the figures in the article. “I am writing with regard of manuscript XXX recently published in XXX. These studies raise significant expectations in XXX patients, because the…
  • Case

    Author dispute over need for retraction

    The authors of a paper are in disagreement over whether the paper should be retracted.  One group of authors (group 1) wishes to publish a correction, and another group (group 2) feel that is inadequate, and the paper should be retracted.  Group 2 is concerned that one of the authors, author X, in group 1 is guilty of scientific misconduct. The remaining group 1 authors do not support this clai…
  • Case

    Accusation of theft of a model

    During refereeing of an article, one of the referees made an accusation of theft regarding a model described in the article. The referee and the authors had been collaborating on a review article previously, but had fallen out. The journal requested evidence from the parties. This involved several rounds of requests to the accuser, as the journal felt that the accuser was not providing anything…
  • Case

    Patient consent

    The journal received a case report for a patient presenting with a particular syndrome in which patients give approximate answers to simple questions. This syndrome has been considered as a dissociative condition but others have argued that it reflects simulation of psychiatric symptoms. The case report was an individual who had crashed his car and, following that, developed complaints of memor…
  • Case

    Duplicate publication

    An email was received from a reader indicating a possible duplicate publication of an article that appeared in the journal in 2004, and a similar publication that appeared in another journal in 2003. The Editor immediately wrote to the author, and to the editor of the other journal, expressing his concerns. The author responded five days later saying that he did not believe that the papers were…
  • Case

    Allegations of scientific fraud and unethical conduct of experiments with attempts to silence the whistleblower

    …The allegations of fraud  A paper reported a radioisotope test for diagnosis of a speci?c,acute,neurological disease with 100% accuracy. Replication studies failed to con?rm the ?ndings and suggested that the test is positive in a…
  • Case

    Dual submission

    A referee’s report on a paper informed this editor that the authors had submitted a very similar paper to another journal. Both papers analyse the same 30 cases of an unusual neoplasm, and the tables and five of the photomicrographs are identical. There is also considerable duplication of text in the article. We have written to the authors requesting them to clarify how this has arisen a…
  • Case

    Ethics, institutional review and studies from private practice

    A manuscript was submitted to our journal regarding a chart review of a novel treatment of a musculoskeletal disease, done at a private clinic in a western country. The patients had given informed consent for the novel treatment, but there was no ethical approval. We contacted the authors, who have replied that ethics approval could not be obtained, and indeed was not needed, because the…
  • Case

    Duplicate publication

    A reader contacted the editorial staff of Journal A after noticing that Journal B, which is primarily non-English, had published a paper that was remarkably similar.      The editor of journal A contacted the editor of Journal B.  Both editors reviewed the two papers and agreed that the paper from Journal B contained methods, results, and conclusions that formed a part of the paper from Journal…
  • Case

    Editor as author in own journal

    This journal specialises in one form of treatment. It is the only Medline listed journal that is widely accessed in Europe by people who use this form of treatment. No international journals provide a suitable alternative. In the USA, the one journal most similar to this is much less specialised and hardly ever accessed in Europe.  The journal editor is a leading researcher in this form…
  • Case

    Ownership of an idea

    A paper was submitted describing a novel technique for preparing tissue, which was noted immediately by a referee to be a modification of a method used by another researcher. The other researcher is thanked but is not included in the author list. The referee asks for advice as he feels that he is in a grey area of ownership of an idea and the degree of novelty needed to make it a “new” idea.  T…
  • Case

    Possible suppression of data

    This is a summary of a problematical research interaction between a pharmaceutical company and academic collaborators at a University involving a widely used drug. A pharmaceutical company appears to have exerted undue influence in an attempt to control the scientific literature. The research involved an important retrospective secondary endpoint in the three key…
  • Case

    Duplicate submission, self-plagiarism

    The journal commissioned a Seminar that arrived in September 2004 and was sent for peer review. In March 2005, we received a peer reviewer’s comments pointing out a very similar paper by the same authors in another journal, published in December 2004. On careful comparison, there was over 70% text copied word-for-word, sometimes with trivial alterations, from the previous publication.

Pages