- Case
Dispute over authorship and usage of research protocol
In November 2009, the Editor of Journal X received a letter complaining of a serious breach of publication ethics regarding an article already published a month earlier on the Journal’s website. The paper concerned had not yet been published in a full journal issue either online or in print. One of the authors of the letter, Professor X, was a named author on the published paper. His complaint… - Case
Retraction or expression of concern?
Shortly after publishing a short report, another group involved in similar work accused one of the authors (A) of the short report of fabricating and/or stealing data from their lab. The other group also stated that author A’s conclusions about an image published in the short report were wrong. We asked to see author A’s original data and talked to his co-authors and the institution wher… - Case
Is it unethical to reject unregistered (or late-registered) trials?
We would like other editors’ opinions as to whether adhering to the journal’s policy on trial registration may contribute towards the non-publication of trial results (and thus bias in the literature). All of our journals have the same policy on trial registration—for studies started before July 2005, we permit retrospective registration (providing it was done before submission) but for… - Case
Claim from an author that his name should not have been included as author on a paper
Dr R submitted a paper to our journal and has since expressed unhappiness about the way in which our journal has dealt with the issue. The manuscript was submitted to our journal according to the usual accepted procedures. Our journal requires that only a single author (the corresponding author) sign the copyright assignment form (on behalf of all the authors). We require that the author… - Case
Nuisance author
…You can listen to the podcast of this case from the menu on the right An author submitted a paper which went through the review process and was rejected. He is now sending abusive emails to me, the editor, and spamming an enormous number of people in his research area and the government (he even tried to contact the royal office) as a protest. He continues to submit his paper (over 20… - Guidelines
Retraction guidelines
…reported to the journal after publication, but in the editor’s view these are not likely to have influenced interpretations or recommendations or the conclusions of the article. Related resources Addressing concerns about systematic manipulation of the publication process, COPE guidance 2023. Guidance on dealing with batch-level… - Case
Publishing complications and patient safety
Journal A is dedicated to communication about practical treatments related directly to patient and personal experiences. These ongoing discussions have been part of this specific medical profession for the past 50 years and journal A is a platform for these discussions. Regarding new treatments and new developments, permission from the local medical ethical commission is mandatory as wel… - Case
Authors requesting withdrawal of articles from similarity check database in order to re-publish
An author's institution requires that authors publish a set amount of times per year in journals that are indexed by Scopus in order to retain their tenure. The author submits to an open access journal and their paper is published after processing charges are paid. After publication the journal is dropped from the Scopus index. The author asks for the paper to be withdrawn by the journal so tha… - Case
Plagiarism case
…significant (10%, from scattered bits of Author A’s paper). The degree of text replication is low - Author B has properly cited and referenced the prior work, and the data are not replicated, as the material under study is different. However, Author B has done a thorough job paraphrasing the text because the concepts are the same, and the structure of the paper is nearly identical – the equations used (as… - News
Case discussion: Suspected plagiarism
…discipline. The similarity index needs to be reviewed carefully, and experienced editors will look at all aspects of the article and the sources when deciding if there is significant overlap. Is there a minimum cut-off score below which there is no need to check for plagiarism? One study found… - Seminars and webinars
Seminar 2022: Relationship between universities and publishers
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Plagiarism case
A letter was sent to the editor indicating that three articles (one of them in the editor’s journal) on identical subjects had been published in the same year (2006) by the same authors, accusing the first author of all three articles of stealing data from and plagiarising a previously published article from the academic institution where the first author previously worked. The letter, sent by… - Case
Duplicated gel images
A few months we were contacted by a dean of an institution who informed us about misconduct of one of the senior scientists in that institution. An investigation launched by the institution showed that author A and coauthors reused the same images to show controls in many figures in their different publications. This problem was found in three publications in our journal. We decided to… - Case
Case of figure duplication and manipulation involving two journals
The editors in chief of journal A and journal B, both owned by society C, received a letter from the last ‘senior’ author, also the corresponding author on one of the papers (author D), concerning separate papers published in both journals (paper E published in journal A and paper F published in journal B), informing them that one of the co-authors on both papers is under investigation for scie… - Case
Retraction or correction?
A reader contacted us with evidence that a number of western blots in a manuscript published by us in 2007 had been duplicated from other published papers; in one case, the same gel was duplicated in the paper itself. I compared the original papers and agreed with the reader. Some of the blots had also been duplicated in other papers but all had been published previous to being published in our… - Seminars and webinars
Artificial intelligence and peer review
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Open retractions data: podcast
… Summary Describe the new partnership between the two nonprofit groups and tell us how it came about? Crossref acquired Retraction Watch's database of article retractions, aligning with their shared mission. The partnership means Crossref… Foreword, COPE Report 2005
…investigated COPE’s council thought it important to find out how close editors were to meeting these standards. Our survey of COPE members was not encouraging [url]. Almost two thirds of respondents had no declared policies on pursuing research misconduct when it is suspected; six out of 10 had no declared complaints procedure; half had no published guidance for authors; and…- Case
Authorship order dispute
…You can listen to the podcast of this case from the menu on the right A manuscript has been accepted for publication in our journal and we would like to publish in the March 2011 issue. The corresponding author (Dr F) is trying to collect copyright forms from all of the authors of the paper to send back to us, but one author will not sign the copyright form due to a disagreement about… - Case
Author misconduct
…You can listen to the podcast of this case from the menu on the right The rector at author D’s institution contacted the editor of journal A stating that they have found what they evidently consider to be serious misconduct in an article written by author D and the rector requested author D to retract the paper from journal A but author D refused to do so. The institution contacted jou…