- Event
Publication Integrity Week 2023
Taking place over a week, Publication Integrity Week included a variety of sessions, with speakers invited to share their experiences. Videos or written summaries of the sessions are available now. Links to each session are below. #C0PE2023 Webinar recordings and… - Case
Request for removal from author list for reasons of religious belief
We have been contacted by an author of a published article who has requested to be removed from the author list. The author is third in the author list and is neither a lead author nor a corresponding author. The CRediT statement for the article reports that the author’s contribution to the work included investigation, validation, formal analysis and data curation. The author says that t… - Case
Unusually frequent submission of articles by a single author
A sixth year medical student, with expected year of graduation of 2013 (Mr X), submitted 29 original articles and 17 letters to the editor in the period February 2012 to October 2012 to our journal. This amounted to an average of five submissions per month. Mr X is an author and corresponding author in every article. Of these, he is the first author of eight original research articles and 12… - News
In the news: February 2022
Each month, COPE Council members find and share publication ethics news. This month the news includes articles on diversity, preprints, research integrity, and more. Preprints This preprint describes the findings of a working group organised by ASAPbio that set out to define key features of preprint review processes. As Covid-19 pandem… - Case
Exposing citation manipulation and fraud in the community
A publisher has identified a ring of three individuals who acted as guest editors for three special issues. These individuals used nine fake accounts to peer review manuscripts. For some manuscripts, the fake identities were used alongside legitimate reviewers, while in other cases they were used exclusively. The publisher has also identified several submissions to those special issues where th… - Case
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 approve… - Case
Retraction request after university investigation found no evidence of fraud
COPE Council judged in 2022 that ‘A journal has the right to retract an article, even when an institutional investigation does not find misconduct. The editor is responsible for the ethical standards of their journal, and if the editor has independent evidence that… Membership: universities and research institutes
COPE announced the launch of membership for selected universities and research institutes in May 2022. An initial group of universities and research institutes have joined as members and will help ensure that the dedicated resources provide the appropriate support and guidance that universities and research institutes need: Aston University |- Flowcharts
Systematic manipulation of the publication process
…process COPE guidance 2023 Paper mills research report COPE & STM, 2022 How to recognise potential manipulation of the peer review process COPE infographic - News
In the news: May 2018 Digest
…Cheating amongst students in Russell Group universities has surged by 40% between 2014 and 2017.https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/29/cheating-at-top-uk-universities-soars-by-30-per-cent And in other news Two new initiatives are raising the profile of… - News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: July 2018
…3px; margin-right: 3px; float: left;" /> Disclosure: CG works for Wiley, where he is Director, Research Integrity and Publishing EthicsPicture credit: CC0 Creative Commons from - News
In the news: November 2018 Digest
…findings. COPE Council member Deborah Kahn Read November Digest: Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections… - Case
A case of scientific misconduct?
…authors wrote back to us, cc'ing the heads of their two research ethics committees, to say that indeed, the manuscript did not match the two different protocols they sent us. They explained that there was a fault in the manuscript and not in the work carried out. They explained that the paper they sent us did not describe a single study but rather parts of 4 different approved studies taking place over… Resources and further reading
…Educational Technologies in Medicine, 26-27 September 2013, Moscow, RussiaBehrooz Astaneh, COPE Council member EASE/ISMTE meeting, Blankenberge, Belgium 23-24 September 2013Mirjam Curno, COPE Council member APAME/JAMJE Seminar,…- Case
Question of paper retraction due to proven fabricated data
…errors in the trial call the study’s reliability into question. Provides transcript of relevant court ruling. This makes it clear that the author became an expert witness in February 2007, after publication of paper but before submission of the letter. He clearly became an expert witness on the basis of the study. Transcript says that author acknowledges inaccuracies—11 of 27 patients who originally… - Case
Conflicts of interest, corrections, and student research
A journal usually publishes one student essay each issue. In a recent issue it published a student essay in support of a controversial but lucrative set of interventions. The paper declared no conflicts of interests and only listed two names in the acknowledgements section without describing their role in the manuscript. The author had been studying an MSc when the first manuscrip… - News
Letter from the COPE Chair: March 2020
…trainer sessions. Stay tuned on this one and we will provide updates as we develop these tools as part of our initiative to facilitate membership of COPE for universities. Best regards, COPE Chair - News
Artificial intelligence and authorship
…users have pointed to examples where ChatGPT has misattributed or fabricated citations suggesting that its training data leans towards a fairly free and easy attitude to plagiarism. On the other hand, as it learns on more refined sets of… - Case
Dealing with cases with culturally offensive content
…The Forum agreed that further guidelines will be useful. The forthcoming COPE guidelines will address some of the issues reviewed here and other resources can be found below: Simone Ragavooloo, Helen Macdonald and Kamran Abbasi, ‘Acting on historically offensive content in BMJ’s archive’, BMJ 2022; 378:o1829 doi… - Case
Scientist reads published paper by former collaborators and claims co-authorship
The case concerns a paper we published, ahead of print, on the journal’s website on 5 October 2009. A week later we received a letter from Dr A who claimed that the authors had a major conflict of interest and implied that she should have been listed as an author. The paper we published is based on an idea which was tested in 2002 in Country P, and in 2004 in Countries Q and R. The authors of t…