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 Some time later a researcher wrote to say that he had been involved at the beginning of the study, but had withdrawn his name because he felt the study was defective.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 had already been rejected, these questions didn’t arise.

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 colleagues. Should the editors: _ attempt to get consent from the patients’ relatives?

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.

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 the data are available in the Cochrane library.

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.

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.

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 publication, but difficulties were experienced tracking down the third editor.

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.

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 questionnaire, some simple lung function, skin, and blood tests.

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 more should he do?