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Showing 141–160 of 183 results
  • Case

    Editorial misconduct

    An associate editor received a letter claiming harassment (from an author from another country) by the editor. The author submitted a manuscript which was repeatedly sent back for changes in format but not rejected. Eventually, the author withdrew the article and submitted it to another international peer reviewed journal with a good impact factor where it was accepted immediately with high pri…
  • Case

    Duplicate submission

    An article was submitted simultaneously to our journal and another journal (who is a member of COPE) on the same date. Both journals received letters saying that the article had not been submitted to another journal. When they received a favourable response from the other journal, and the article was published, we were informed by the authors that they wished to withdraw the paper from our jour…
  • Case

    Possible duplicate publication

    An article by a Far Eastern group was published in our journal in November 2005. We were later alerted by an interested reader that the same article, slightly changed, was published in an American journal. I contacted the American journal and the article will now be officially retracted from that journal. Part of the explanation could be poor communication between the authors, but I am not sure…
  • Case

    Possible breach of confidentiality by a reviewer

    One of the figures in an article under review was said by the authors to appear in a presentation given at a conference while the paper was still under review and from this identified the reviewer and accused this person of abusing their position. We could not confirm to the authors that they had correctly identified the reviewer. The authors contacted the reviewer directly and also contacted t…
  • Case

    Repetitive duplicate submission to multiple journals and redundant publication

    This case came to light when the editors of two journals (J1 and J2) established that the same manuscript (MsA) had been submitted to both journals simultaneously. On bringing this information to the attention of the author, stating the seriousness with which this action was viewed and requesting an explanation, the author apologised and withdrew the manuscript from both journals w…
  • Case

    Request for a retraction of a retraction

    In October 2000, a journal published a retraction of a February 2000 publication of a research paper. In the same issue the dean of the corresponding author’s medical school reported the findings of an investigational committee that found, contrary to what was stated in the paper: ·        There was no ethics committee…
  • 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

    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

    Duplicate publication

    In 2003 a paper was published in a specialist surgical journal following proper peer review.  The paper summarised the experience of a group of clinicians concerned in treating malignancy in the Head and Neck using a novel method of therapy - and was a case series of 25 patients.  The paper was not considered to be one of high priority but was published because of the paucity of information con…
  • Case

    Plagiarism

    A review article by an expert group plagiarised an article from another journal. It was largely a direct translation, involving large slabs of the text. Some of the authors are on the editorial board of the journal where the paper was published. There was no declaration that this was a translation of another article. … The editor is potentially in a very difficult situati…
  • Case

    Sanitising a misleading statement

    Author A published a paper in Journal X, which presented evidence of failure by another research group to declare a serious conflict of interest in a paper that had been published some years before in Journal Y. This conflict of interest centred around the undeclared involvement of a third party with a vested interest. Evidence for this was presented in the form of correspondence from the third…
  • Case

    Reviewer/author conflict of interest

    Dr B accepted an invitation to review a manuscript for Journal A. Dr B was aware only of the title of the manuscript and had read the abstract before accepting the invitation. He was also aware that he was to return his review within two weeks. When the review failed to materialise within the allotted period, the editorial office of Journal A sent the reviewer four email reminders over t…
  • Case

    Russian scientific misconduct

    A letter was sent to an editor, claiming that scientific misconduct had taken place in Russia. The editor did not want to ignore the issue, which was not related to submitted papers and could not be published as a letter. But s/he was unsure what action to take. … This would be best pursued as an investigative news story.…
  • Case

    Dispute over plagiarism

    A review article, written by two authors, was spontaneously submitted to Journal X and accepted for publication after favourable comments from the referees. A few weeks later, and before the paper had been published, Author A withdrew authorship because he could not guarantee the originality of the text. Apparently, Author A had recently discovered that another review paper, co-authored with th…
  • Case

    Plagiarism in a review article

    A review article was spontaneously submitted and sent out to three peer reviewers, which is standard practice for the journal. One of these reviewers expressed “serious concerns” about the paper. In a telephone conversation, s/he explained that the structure (headings, subheadings, etc), large “chunks of the text,” and most of the references had been plagiarised from a teaching syllabus that s/…
  • Case

    Possible malpractice revealed in a case report

    We received a case report describing the diagnosis and treatment of a middle-aged woman who presented to a gastroenterology service in England with weight loss and a right iliac fossa mass. The authors did a barium swallow, duodenal and gastric biopsies, and diagnosed Crohn’s disease by the radiological appearances on follow-through. They did not do a colonoscopy, or biopsy the mass in the term…
  • Case

    Dispute between authors and a reviewer

    A concise report on a rare disease was submitted and sent out to an internationally renowned reviewer in the field. He felt that some of the data had been obtained in his unit, and this had not been acknowledged by the authors. The authors responded that the tests had been performed in their own laboratory, but that the scans had indeed been done elsewhere. The editor suggested that perhaps the…
  • Case

    Multiple submissions of a paper

    A paper suggested that a cluster of symptoms, signs, and tests could be combined to diagnose pneumonia in general practice. The paper was rejected after being read by two editors, because it was preliminary and had not been validated in an independent population. The authors submitted a new manuscript the following year, describing the same patients and focusing on the accuracy of individual sy…
  • Case

    Attempts to draw attention to potential duplicate publication

    A medical student brought a case of duplicate publication in two journals in the same specialty to the attention of an editor of a third journal. The article in Journal A was published in 1997 and the article in Journal B was published in 1999. The editor wrote to both journals and asked them to investigate. The editor wrote several times over two years before he retired. The editor received a…

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