- Case
Authorship dispute and possible unreported protocol amendment
Our journal accepted a randomised controlled trial for publication which has not yet been published online. In the submitted paper, the randomised controlled trial is described as commencing in 2004 with completion in 2011. We have received an email and telephone call from an individual not listed as an author or reviewer of the paper with the following alleged disputes:• He was an invest… - Case
Case histories and post publication debate
A letter to the editor from reader A was received by our journal concerning a published case history from author B. Reader A questioned the choice of treatment and author B's conclusion regarding the reason why the patient died. We believe this case raises at least two interesting questions. Firstly, the patient, or in this case the patient's relatives, could possibly suffer an addition… - Case
Authorship issues from disbanded consortium
A manuscript was submitted to one of our journals in a special issue. The initial submission included 15 authors with 9 affiliations. The authors were part of a consortium which has now been disbanded. The manuscript was provisionally accepted for publication. At this point, three of the authors requested to be removed from the author list, citing irreconcilable differences with the corr… - Case
Salami slicing/duplicate publication
An article with four authors was published in journal A. The same article with a slight change in the title and one additional author, was published three months later in journal B. The authors had submitted the article to both journals at the same time. The number of study subjects in the two articles were the same, with a very slight difference in the wordings of the objective o… - Case
Excessive self-citation in a book chapter
The case concerns an introductory chapter in a book. The publisher was first contacted about potential misconduct as part of a broader investigation into an academic who was a coauthor on an introductory chapter in a book. The publisher's subsequent investigation identified excessive self-citation in the work (one of the coauthors is named as an author on 12 out of 16 referenced works).… - News
Guest editorial: Tackling paper mills
…are committed to increasing transparency in our publishing processes, supporting the academic community and other publishers in talking about publication and research integrity issues. As such in 2022, we took the opportunity to share our experience in identifying paper mill submissions and identifying image manipulation at Bioscience Reports with the attendees of the 16th EASE General Assembly and… Press
…="https://publicationethics.org/increasing-number-fraudulent-papers-produced-paper-mills">Increasing number of fraudulent papers produced by “paper mills” 16 October 2020 Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via "paper mills" is emerging as a growing issue. Paper mills produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that seem to resemble genuine research. They may be similar in layout, experimental approach and have similar images or figures.- Case
Sufficient consent?
A paper was submitted which enrolled elderly nursing home patients to an experimental study of the effect of a medicinal plant on skin ulcers. Although the plant is licensed for use in other skin conditions, it does not have a specific licence for this indication. The study did not mention ethical approval or whether consent was obtained so the editor wrote to the author to query it. The author… - Case
Profusion of copied text passages
Recently, our journal has introduced systematic analysis of all submitted manuscripts for plagiarised text, using anti-plagiarism software. We had noticed increased incidences of recycling of existing text which is why we introduced the systematic check. It turns out that a large proportion of the submitted manuscripts (an estimated 30–50%) yield positive results, with copy values of somewhere… - Case
Author requests permission to publish review comments
An author submitted a Forum manuscript critiquing an article published in the journal six years previously. The Forum manuscript was reviewed by three reviewers who all recommended rejection, and was evaluated by an associate editor and a senior editor, who rejected the manuscript on the grounds that the reviewers were unconvinced by the critique and felt that it did not really advance the subj… - Case
Institutional investigation of authorship dispute
We received a claim that several authors were removed from an article published in one of our journals before the article was submitted. None of those said to have been removed were acknowledged. The claimant requested retraction. They said the article was previously submitted to other journals, listing them as an author. They provided what they said was an earlier version of the article… - Case
Concerns regarding image manipulation and inconsistent figure legends
A journal received a complaint from readership about manipulation of images of gels and also of some figures which had been published as part of a thesis with different sample legends. The authors were contacted to provide explanations for the observed inconsistencies. The authors provided full images and then an official expert analysis, but the Editor-in-Chief did not feel that these response… - News
In the news: February Digest
…href="https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/01/16/data-science-revolution-interview-xiao-li-meng/" target="_blank">https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/01/16/data-science-revolution-interview-xiao-li-meng/ Open access Marcus Düwell proposes 5 possible pitfalls and problems around open science principles in order to expand the conversation and thinking of… - News
Letter from the COPE co-Chairs: July 2018
…their decision-making editors are, and which business models they adopt? Operational transparency means answering these questions (and more) clearly, for the communities that we serve to see. The 16 Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (from COPE, OASPA, DOAJ, and WAME) define what types of operational transparency we think are necessary. COPE assesses membership… - Case
Duplicate submission or self plagiarism. Is the author to blame?
An article was submitted to Journal A for publication. According to the journal’s policy, the article was scanned using anti-plagiarism detection software, which gave a 17% similarity result. As the journal allows up to 20% similarity, the article was sent for peer review to two reviewers. One of the reviewers noted that the article had been published in a similar form in a conference proceedin… COPE webinar: Understanding text recycling
…Understanding text recycling Friday 7 August 2020, 16:00-17:15pm (BST) Registration is now closed for this event COPE is hosting a webinar on text recycling when we will hear the latest findings from the members of the Text Recycling Research Project since- Case
Critical comment and conflict of interest
Journal A received an article by Dr X (Article 1) commenting on another author’s work (Dr. Y) which had been published in Journal A and another journal (Journal B) of a different publisher. Because the scientific arguments were involved, and because the articles being criticised had been cited many times in the literature, the Editors of Journal A rejected Dr X's request to publish the work as… - Case
Ethics and consent in research
A letter was sent to the chief editor of our journal in response to a recently published article in our journal. The author had serious concerns about the ethics and consent obtained as a result of this study and the follow-up by the researchers. The author explained that he was the physician of two of the “volunteers” who participated in this study and was concerned about informed conse… - Case
Compromised peer review (unpublished)
A manuscript was flagged to editor X as having received reviewers’ reports indicating very high interest. At that point the manuscript had been through one round of review, revision and re-review, and all three reviewers were advising that the manuscript be accepted without further revision. On checking the credentials of the three reviewers, editor X was unable to find the publication r… - Case
What extent of plagiarism demands a retraction versus correction?
A short research article described a new method and tested the method, showing proof-of-concept that the method worked; the idea for the method is presented as the authors’ own. On publication, the paper receives an overwhelmingly positive response from the community. Shortly after publication, the editorial team is contacted by a PhD student and their supervisor who had published the id…