- Case
An anonymous letter in response to qualitative research
Some two months after publishing a piece of qualitative research about health behaviour in an ethnic minority group, an anonymous letter suggested that the work might be fraudulent. The letter was in very poor English, but made two main points. Firstly, the original study did not make clear how many women were included, and secondly, the anonymous respondent could not understand who could have… - Case
Rights of reviewers
A clinical professor of medicine was asked to act as a reviewer for a submitted paper.The paper had not been presented publicly or in abstract form. The reviewer returned an extensive list of suggested alterations, but rated the paper highly. The other two reviewers also rated the paper highly, but suggested only minor modifications. The editor invited the authors to undertake a minor revision… - Case
Submission without knowledge of the corresponding author
A case report was received and the corresponding author was duly notified. The corresponding (and senior author) immediately faxed back, asking who had submitted the case report as he had not been consulted and had not seen the manuscript.The submission letter contained the names of all four authors; three of the signatures had been made using the same pen and probably the same hand.The signatu… - Case
Author dispute and dual submission
A case report was submitted for consideration and, following favourable review, was accepted for publication by Journal A. All three authors signed the copyright release form, but about six weeks later a request not to publish the article was received by e-mail, which was attributed to a “misunderstanding and argument between two of the authors.” The editor wrote to all three authors expressin… - Case
A further case of redundant publication
A paper was submitted to a UK specialist medical journal. At review, one of the reviewers alerted the editor to the fact that a very similar paper had been published in a US specialist title. It seems very likely that the reports describe the same randomised controlled trial. The only piece of new information was not an important outcome of the trial. The authors did not disclose the existence… - Case
Should editors get involved in authorship disputes?
A paper from Finland in a controversial area of vaccine research was peer reviewed and provisionally accepted. At the revision stage, the journal received a letter from a researcher based at an immunotherapy company in the United States, raising serious doubts over the analysis of the Finnish data. This author claimed to have been involved in the research, and proposed an alternative interpreta… - Case
The discontented and abandoned contributor
A paper was rejected after peer review. Some time later a researcher wrote to say that he had been involved at the beginning of the study, but had withdrawn his name because he felt the study was defective. He had heard that the study had been submitted for publication, and thought it better that the editors were made aware of his doubts before publication rather than afterwards. As the paper h… - Case
The careless surgeon
A paper was submitted in which a young surgeon described five patients who died over six months under the care of one surgeon. The author suggested that the surgeon was dangerous and that something should have been done. Nothing was done and the surgeon has since retired. The paper, a very personal one, provides an interesting insight into the difficulties that doctors have dealing with problem… - Case
The anonymous critic
A letter containing details of a case report was submitted in February 1999. The authors were from Japan. After peer review and revision, the case report was accepted and a proof was sent to the authors. Two anonymous letters were then received, one on April 29 and another on 12 May, both from Japan. Both letters claimed that the author “has prized honour above everything else” and that he had… - Case
A first report, not followed by a second
In 1984, journal X published a brief report of a randomised trial as a letter to the editor. No full publication of this trial followed, despite calls for this from colleagues in the field. It took the intervention of a regional research ethics committee and a dean to persuade the investigators to write a final manuscript.This paper has still not been submitted for publication, although some of… - Case
Redundant publication and change of authors
A paper was submitted to journal A with a covering letter stating that it was entirely original. However, when the editor looked at the references he found considerable overlap with a paper already published in journal B about the same infection outbreak, but with a completely different set of authors bar one. A comparison of the papers showed that there was considerable overlap. When challenge… - Case
Publication of misleading information and publication
I analysed the results of a randomised controlled trial that had just been completed by some of my colleagues. The trial compared an oxygen radical scavenger with a placebo in patients with acute myocardial infarction. One of the major outcome measures included infarct size,as measured by nuclear imaging. My analysis showed that there was no significant difference between groups for either of t… - Case
Yet another case of duplicate publication
A paper published in journal A in 1990 was published almost verbatim in journal B the following year, and yet again in journal C in 1993. None of these publications made any reference to the others. The case emerged in the process of one of the authors applying for a professorship. The authors conceded their error when tackled on the issue. One editor agreed to publish notice of duplicate publi… - Case
Ethical status of authors’ actions?
A consultant in public health and a consultant clinical biochemist employed by a health authority submitted a paper. It sought to address the question of benzodiazepine abuse and re-sale on the black market. The authors identified the practices with the highest prescribing rates for benzodiazepines, and asked GPs to agree to request urine samples from patients with a benzodiazepine prescription… - Case
What happens when there is no local ethics committee?
A paper from Taiwan was reviewed and accepted for publication. However, one of the reviewers raised the question of ethics committee approval. When the editors checked with the authors, they responded that there is no ethics committee at their university and they were therefore not able to seek ethical approval. What is COPE’s view on this? The study was fairly straightforward involving a quest… - Case
Plagiarism
A paper by Turkish authors was submitted to journal A. The paper was virtually the same as one published in the equivalent US journal B of the same specialty,but with different authors. The paper submitted to journal A seems to have been plagiarised from the paper published in journal B. The editor has written to the deans of the faculties of medicine to which the authors are attached. What mor… - Case
The manipulated contributor list
A paper was published for which the authors’contributions were as follows: A and B had the original idea and planned the study. A was also responsible for collecting the samples and patient data. C established the database and participated in planning the clinical trial. D developed the enzyme linked immunoabsorbent assay and analysed all the samples. E and F were responsible for the statistica… - Case
A lost author and a new hypothesis
A paper was published in January 1998,and seven authors were credited. B was thanked for his contribution in the acknowledgements section. One year later B wrote to the editor, outlining two alleged incidents related to this paper. First, the cohort reported in the January 1998 paper was one that B had been working on since the early 1990s. In 1992–3 he sought collaboration with another researc… - Case
“Inadvertent” duplicate publication
A paper submitted for consideration in March 1997 was peer reviewed, successfully modified, and accepted for publication in June 1997. In January 1998 the paper was prepared for publication, and a commentary sought from an expert in the same field, scheduled for publication in the same issue. The expert drew the editor’s attention to the fact that a similar paper (albeit in shortened form) had… - Case
The author who wasn’t an author
A paper was submitted crediting three authors. The paper was sent to one of the journal’s regular statistical reviewers without noticing that she happened to be the second author. She wrote back to say that she had not been involved in writing the manuscript, nor had she seen this paper before. She did say, however, that she had supervised the computer input of the questionnaire data and that…