- Case
Ethical approval procedural lapse
…cohort had been published in another journal, and there was considerable overlap. It then transpired that the study had no formal ethical approval, which the authors justified by saying that their institute had no ethics committee, the study involved no intervention as such, and that they had voluntarily adhered to their country's medical research council guidelines for research on human… - Case
Dual submission
…possibly somewhat naïve, but the editor confirmed that they had published previously. It was felt that the most appropriate course of action would be to write to the authors again, in the strongest terms possible, asking for an explanation and giving them a deadline by which to reply. If no reply is received, then the editor should write to their head of department or institution, laying out the… - News
COPE Forum agenda and materials: 23 September 2014 meeting
The next COPE Forum meeting is being held on Tuesday 23 September, 3–5pm (British Summer Time). The COPE Forum will be held virtually via webinar. Download the agenda and materials here (PDF, 805kb). The invitation to join the webinar is below. We can accommodate up to 100 attendees, so please register… - Case
Secondary analysis of medical records and ethics committee approval
A journal received a manuscript using secondary analysis of existing medical records in which there was no indication that ethics approval was obtained from a recognized ethics review board or that participants gave their informed consent to be included in the study. Instead, the authors explained that the study had been based on a secondary analysis of existing medical records and that no… - Case
Plagiarism
The editor received no response from the deans of the faculties of medicine to which the authors were attached, and no response from the authors.… - Forum discussion topics
COPE Forum 5 November 2018: Predatory Publishing
Predatory publishing is generally defined as for-profit open access journal publication of scholarly articles without the benefit of peer review by experts in the field or the usual editorial oversight of the journals in question. The journals have no standards and no quality control and frequently publish within a very brief period of time while claiming that articles are peer-reviewed. There… - Case
Possibly unethical plastic surgery
A paper was submitted in which a plastic surgeon described what we thought was a very strange and unconventional operation. We asked the opinion of another plastic surgeon, who described the procedure as “very dangerous. ” He said that there was no consistent evidence that this operation could possibly work. The operation had been conducted in a private clinic, and we are sufficiently… - Case
Ethical approval and parental consent
A journal received a paper from a single author, attributed to a UK institution, in which 10 children were operated on using two techniques, each child having one technique to one side and one to the other side, at the same operation. The paper went to review, and neither reviewer spotted that this was a prospective surgical study on children, with no mention of consent or ethical… - Case
Sanctions for citation cartels?
…citations and that the scholarly content within them is minimal (to date, no indications of plagiarism have been found). The peer review for these issues was done ‘off-system’ and despite the publisher requesting copies of all peer review reports, they have yet to receive them (peer review ‘off-system’ is no longer allowed—these issues were published some years ago). To date, expressions of… - Translated resources
Proceso de revisión por pares comprometido en artículos publicados: caso
…accedían estudiantes, colaboradores o el autor A con sus cuentas de correo. El autor A solicitaba a los revisores sugeridos (o a las personas tras estas cuentas) que enviasen revisiones positivas de los artículos y lo hiciesen rápidamente, o el propio autor A enviaba las revisiones a través de la cuenta falsa. El autor A admitió utilizar este sistema en diversos artículos, pero no en todos, aunque se… - Case
Difficulty in obtaining patient consent
…traced. The patient’s wife had also died and there were no children. The editors accepted this explanation and peer reviewed the article for possible publication.… - Case
Unable to contact authors
…accepted for publication and the corresponding author was asked to review the final revision of the manuscript, the corresponding author stopped answering emails. The journal tried to contact the corresponding author several times. The journal also tried to contact the co-authors and the university (the department of the authors), but no response has been received. Thus the manuscript is ready for… - Case
Redundant publication
…pressures. They are give the same drugs in the same hospital and had the same length of follow-up. The same outcomes are presented in both papers. (2) There is no lifting of text verbatim. (3) No substantially different or new material is presented in either paper in comparison with the other. A little more information on deaths and dropouts appeared in the BMJ paper in response to questions by the… - Case
Scientifically meaningless research without consent
…new treatment. The practitioner admitted that he did not have ethics committee approval, and our judgement is that the study is effectively scientifically meaningless. It would be impossible to conclude anything with confidence. The men in the trial no doubt gave consent for the treatment, although there must be doubts about how informed their consent was. It’s not clear, however, whether they knew… - Case
Researchers give an experimental therapy to patients based on a laboratory study published in our journal
Although most of the Forum felt there was not much that could be done, some felt that this was an issue of informed consent and the editor had a duty to find out if consent was obtained. The advice was to contact the authors and ask them to provide information on whether or not consent or ethics approval had been obtained, with a deadline for an answer. If no or no satisfactory answer is… - Case
Allegation of fraud and insider trading
…advice from two further statisticians, who felt there was no evidence of fraud. The paper was accepted. Recently the journal received a phone call from X who wanted us to know that the company is aggressively touting its stock by saying it has a major paper that will soon appear in a prestigious journal. X also alleged that he had information raising further doubts about the conduct… - Case
Low risk study with no ethics committee approval
A manuscript was submitted to our journal that describes a social media advocacy campaign that was run by an international NGO for the purpose of eliciting public support for a new law in a low-middle income country. The authors are from the NGO and the government department in that country, that together funded and ran the campaign, and also collected and analysed the data used in the manuscri… - Translated resources
El editor y los revisores solicitan que se cite su trabajo: caso
…casos, cifra que triplicaba el número de veces que el editor solicitaba añadir citaciones de trabajos en los que no aparecía como coautor. El editor invitaba frecuentemente a los mismos cuatro revisores a revisar los artículos que gestionaba. A veces, las solicitudes para añadir citaciones venían de estos revisores y, otras veces, solo del editor. Este editor solicitaba que sus propios artículos… - Case
Publication of private data
…research purposes. No particular ethics approval was sought for the study as it was based on staff/professionals and most were known to the principal author. The question is whether these data on amount of funding are private or public. While grant income data can be available in funders' websites/reports or the institutional/departmental websites, certainly it exists in Research Assessment… - Case
The incomplete retraction
A journal published a paper several years ago that subsequently had to be retracted, on the advice of the university where the work had been conducted. The university provided no further details but promised to do so. Two years later they confirmed that the paper should be retracted, but gave no information on exactly what had gone wrong and whether anybody had been punished. Subsequently, one…