- Case
Erratum query
We have been notified that an erratum is about to be published on a Research article in Journal A, which is one of the key references supporting a Review article subsequently published in Journal B. All parties are agreed that the erratum (which corrects an oversight in reporting methodology) in no way affects either the data presented in the paper or the conclusions reached. Questio… - Event
Online webinar series on good reporting of health research studies
…co-editor-in-chief of Trials and Founder of the EQUATOR Network. Time: 15:00 GMT (London) 10:00 EST (Washington, Ottawa) The webinar will last approximately 1 hour. Language: conducted in English only. Sound knowledge of the key principles of reporting various types of health research is crucial for researchers and professionals involved… - Event
COPE Forum: Thursday 14 October 2021
The 14 October 2021 COPE Forum will be held at 14:00-15:30pm BST (UTC + 1). - Case
Studies where there is no research ethics committee, or where committees disagree as to the need for approval
The editor of this journal, in common with other journals, requires that, where appropriate, studies published should have been approved by the relevant ethics committee. In some cases researchers have reported to the editor that they have found no committee willing to accept competence, or that different committees are taking different lines on which studies require approval. As an exam… - Event
COPE North American Seminar and Forum 2011
…background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; line-height: 1.5; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; ">Following on from the success of the North American COPE seminar and COPE Forum last year, we have decided to repeat the events, but this time on the West Coast of America. COPE will hold a COPE Forum on the… - Case
Registration of a randomised control trial
…be rejected. If the study is registered late, the journal should consider a declaration on the paper about why, and provide a guarantee to the journal that any related papers will be registered Related resources https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2016/04/15… - Case
Duplicate publication in a non-English language journal
Two authors submitted a case report which was interesting but not written in the style of the journal. The editor therefore invited the authors to rewrite the case report, and resubmit it. They did so within a week. The case report was sent out for peer review, accepted and published. The head of department of one of the authors then wrote to the journal, stating that the case report had… - News
In the news: May 2021
…discussion can be found here. Peer review CUP has recently published an open access book “Reading Peer Review”, in which the authors analyse the database of peer review reports at PLOS One to gain… - Case
Retraction of article from 1994
Professor A and professor B has been in a dispute over a certain type of treatment for over 15 years. Professor A has accused professor B of killing a patient while he was (in professor A’s view) doing research on the patient without consent. Professor B has accused professor A of research and publication misconduct because he published a paper in journal X in 1994 that included a selected… - Case
Query about errata
Your retraction guidelines include comments about corrections. They also advise that notices of retraction should be linked to the original retracted articles. But, it is not 100% clear whether notices of correction (that is, errata and corrigenda, as opposed to retractions) should also be linked directly to/embedded in the origi… - Case
Retraction of article and accompanying editorial
The authors of a published article have asked to have an article retracted for internal policy reasons. However, we have solicited and published an editorial which accompanies this article and specifically references it within the text. We are unsure how to handle this. Question for COPE Council Does COPE have any policy or protocol for cases like this? … FORUM DISCUSSION TOPIC: comments please
…clinical trial data—A proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. New England Journal of Medicine, January 20. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMe1515172 Vickers A J. (2006). Whose data set is it anyway? Sharing raw data from randomized trials. Trials 7; 15. DOI: 10.1186/1745-6215-7-15 Wager, E. (2016). Sharing data is a good thing. But we need to consider the…- Case
Editor manipulation of impact factor
…one of the attendees at the Forum. Questions such as these can be raised to obtain more specific information, for example, the question about citing papers in an issue in the editorial. There is generally a limit of 15% for self-citations but it might be possible for editors to calculate this so that they come up to but not over the limit. Summary of previous advice:… - Forum discussion topics
Predatory publishing: next steps and where do we go from here?
…was discussed at the COPE Forum on Tuesday 15 December 2020. Questions for the Forum Should COPE use its criteria for membership as an instrument to evaluate standards of scholarly publishing vehicles for the purpose of informing authors, peer reviewers, readers, scholars invited to serve on editorial boards, and universities evaluating scholarly productivity? … - Case
Allegation of fraudulent publication
Journal A published a paper in 2002. In 2004 the Editor of Journal A was contacted by a reader, who expressed his doubts as to the integrity of one of the authors associated with the 2002 paper. The reader suggested that the author in question had been involved in the fraudulent publication of a paper published in Journal B in 2001. The reader had noted that the article published in Journal… - Case
Plagiarized figure
We received a review paper and it was accepted and published on our website. We then noticed that one of the figures had been copied from a paper published in another journal. Before publication, we asked the authors if the figures were original or if they needed references, and the authors responded that they were original. After confirmation of the similarity of one figure to a publish… - Case
Duplicate articles due to DOI reassignment
The editors of Journal C have found that 15 of their recent articles have been assigned slightly different DOIs in the Online First and the final issue versions. This arose from administrative problems with the publisher’s production process and has resulted in duplicated articles in both spaces, and there may be other duplicate articles due to reassigning different DOIs. The editors of… - Case
Potential peer reviewer misconduct
A journal received the recommendation of a peer reviewer which expressed doubts about the validity of some of the data in an article. The editor-in-chief got in touch directly with the author and mediated to have the data validated by an outside contributor. The authors responded by providing data validation by a colleague, who is now becoming a potential coauthor. The initial data were… - News
Case discussion: gift authorship
…href="https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2014-44015-002.html">The Behavior Analyst Today, Daniel Shabani et al (2004) reported that the 53 most prolific authors in the field of behaviour sciences published an average of 2.9 articles per year between 1992 and 2001; the 11 most prolific authors published 4.2 articles per year. In an analysis of medical papers published from 2008 to 2012, - News
Conflicts of interest focus
…href="https://publicationethics.org/case/attempt-supress-legitimate-scientific-results">case 15-15), consequences of allowing a peer reviewer with a conflict of interest to continue reviewing a paper (case 10-34), and editors with conflicts of interest (e.g., cases 11-04 and