- Case
Invasive intervention without consent
A study was submitted on the safety and feasibility of treating patients with acute stroke with an invasive procedure that would cause them considerable discomfort. The editor did not want to publish the study because it had negative results, did not include a power calculation, and was almost certainly too small to detect a clinically useful difference. The study had obtained local ethics comm… - Case
Author dispute concerning ownership of data
A paper submitted to Journal X was reviewed and rejected with the recommendation that it be submitted to a more clinical journal. The paper was duly submitted to Journal Y. The authorship was A, B, C, D and E, with E being the corresponding author linking together two research groups in different cities, but in the same country. Journal Y sent the paper to reviewers and, after discussion, thei… - Forum discussion topics
Artificial intelligence (AI) and fake papers
…Chatbots in Relation to Scholarly Publications OpenAI’s image-creation tool DALL-E2 VC Bachelet and M. Rousseau-Portalis. A technology-based, financially sustainable, quality improvement intervention in a medical journal for bilingualism from submission to… - News
In the news: June 2021
…misbehaviours. This article describes the work being carried out by the Centre for Journalology, which researches, teaches and performs outreach on metascience, the use of scientific techniques to study the research process itself. Intellectual Property A - Case
Authorship issue
…now left the institution). Dr A held the IRB. Dr A had instructed Dr C not to publish until the mother paper was completed. Dr C was asked by the editors to comment on these points, and he responded by saying that: the intellectual contribution from Drs A and B was minimal; he (Dr C) had added the relevant addendum to the IRB myself; Drs A and B had threatened to ruin his career if he did… - Case
Author requests for certain experts not to be included in the editorial process
…a policy for handling requests to exclude individuals from the journal’s editorial process. The following has been added to the journal’s editorial policy: “We reserve the right to send manuscripts to the reviewers of our choice”. The editor considers the case closed. Related resource Spanish version: - Case
Professional misconduct of one author
…a valid reason for issuing a correction to the literature. Moreover, if ICMJE authorship criteria are being used, the reason for removal of an author needs to be added; it must be an academic reason; and all authors would have to agree and sign off in… - News
Artificial intelligence: Lightning talk summary
…The checks carried out by AI are done at various stages: as part of initial verifications, as peer review is initiated, and as it continues. Sometimes flags are raised late in the process, for example, if new data have been added to the training bank after the article went into the process. Deciding when to run checks is a complicated process, especially when a manuscript is also changing as it… - News
In the news: June 2018 Digest
…Major philanthropic organizations, like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust don’t yet require sharing of results. The reason for concern per Dr.Bruckner: over $85 billion invested into medical research goes to waste every year because results are not available. http://www.peah.it/2018/05/5322/ On May 25th, the EU’s General Data Protection… - 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… - Flowcharts
General approach to publication ethics for the editorial office
…class="resource-download-inline__meta">PDF 99 KB COPE has many resources to assist publishers and editors in making decisions about ethical issues in publication, including guidelines, - Case
Misconduct on a massive scale?
Almost five years ago two outsiders approached an editor suggesting that a large series of papers from a particular researcher, including some published in high profile journals, might be fraudulent. Those contacting the editor thought it possible that the patients described in the studies had never existed at all. Round about the same time a few papers from this author were circulating in the… - News
Case discussion: critiques after publication
…can be contacted and an expression of concern added in the interim. If the author remains uncooperative, the editor is bound to retract the paper for the sake of not misleading readers, researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and other stakeholders. The retraction notice should transparently explain what post-publication review procedures were followed and what happened. As an additional… - News
In the news: October 2020
…="https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/journals-books/books/diversifying-readership-through-open-access" target="_blank">usage of open vs non-open access books and found that OA books were dowloaded 10 times more often, and cited 2.4 times more often, than non-OA books. A systematic search of "vanished" open access journals, using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, discovered 176 open access journals that vanished from the web (2000-2019).… - 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
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… - News
Predatory behaviour in publication ethics
…href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133320301270?via%3Dihub">list of predatory journals is inevitably subjective and varies from one list to another. Publishers and editors… Text Recycling: Forum discussion topic March 2013
…should amend the literature by adding the missing citation and clarifying what is new in the subsequent publication versus the original publication. Journal editors should consider publishing a retraction article when: There is significant overlap in the text, generally excluding methods, with sections that are identical or near identical to a previous publication by the same…- News
In the news: August
…="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/07/21/book-review-research-ethics-in-the-real-world-by-helen-kara/" target="_blank">https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/07/21/book-review-research-ethics-in-the-real-world-by-helen-kara/ Misconduct Jennifer A Byrne is a cancer researcher who is committed to cleaning the literature as much as she is to adding to it. She began her crusade to do so after noting… - News
In the news: January Digest
…behavioural research. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0772-6 Ethical oversight ICMJE recommendations have been revised. The main changes are rephrasing COIs to relationships and activities, adding efforts for inclusion and diversity, and advising against citing predatory…