- Case
Revoked parental consent
Our journal publishes case reports describing the evaluation, diagnosis and treatment of unusual cases. Parents must provide written informed consent prior to manuscript submission. No cases are presented with unique identifiers and each is anonymised as much as possible. A manuscript was submitted with written consent that was accepted for publication and assigned to an issue. Just befo… - Case
Ethics committee approval
We routinely ask for ethics committee approval from every research manuscript submitted to our journal. Sometimes, studies from different countries may not have ethics committee approval and authors may claim that their study does not need approval. In such situations, we consult COPE’s “Guidance for Editors: Research, Audit and Service Evaluations” document and evaluate the study at the editor… - Research
CrossCheck guidance: an analysis of typical cases of plagiarism in different disciplines 2010
…Xinxin Zhang, Meiqing Jin, Chunjie Zhang). Update The results of part of this research were presented at the CrossRef 2011 Annual Meeting, USA, 15 November 2011 (download the presentation, (PDF 745kb). The purpose of this survey was to investigate journal editors' use of CrossCheck to… - Case
Duplicate publication and removal of article
The editor of journal A was alerted to the fact that an article published in journal A had been previously published in journal B and constituted a duplicate publication. The editor contacted the authors who explained that they had tried to withdraw the article from journal B but their request was ignored and the article was published against their wishes. The authors contacted journal B… - Case
Author impersonating corresponding author without knowledge of coauthors
We received an article which was accepted and published after an uneventful peer review process. The article was apparently written by seven authors from two universities. As part of our routine processes, all co-authors were alerted to a submission via the email addresses provided by the submitting author. Some time after the article had been published, we received an email from the cor… - Case
Inability to contact an author to obtain permission to publish
Author A was an overseas PhD student who successfully completed the PhD, and then returned home to a country with considerable political and civil unrest. It had been intended to submit a paper before author A left but time ran out. Subsequently, authors B, C, D and E, who were all involved in the work in one form or another (experimental design, performing preliminary experiments, data interpr… - Research
Editing of reviewer comments: a COPE survey 2020
…="https://publicationethics.org/sites/default/files/editing_reviewer_comments_survey_results_2020.pdf" target="_blank">Editing reviewer comments survey 2020 PDF 311 KB Key points 145 individuals completed some or all of the survey. About 15% said they believed it is never… - Case
Withdrawal of an article
We received a manuscript for consideration for publication in one of our journals (Journal A). During the peer review process we became aware that the manuscript had already been published in another journal (Journal B). When we asked the authors about this they said that they had asked the other journal to withdraw their manuscript before publication but this had not been done. We rejected the… - News
In the News: July Digest
…research.https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/jun/15/is-competition-driving-innovation-or-damaging-scientific-research Seven researchers have been found responsible for scientific misconduct by Karolinska Insitute,… - Case
Handling self-admissions of fraud
In November 2014, the first author of a decade old paper in our journal and a 15-year-old paper from another journal informed us that he faked the data in two figure panels in the paper in our journal and one figure panel in the paper in the other journal. The main gist of the manipulation was loading unequal amounts or delayed loading of gel lanes. Self-admission of data falsification… - Case
Attempt to supress legitimate scientific results
The journal is operated by institute A, and the editor is an employee of institute A. A manuscript was submitted late in 2014 by authors from institute B, a similar type of organisation in the same country. The manuscript was reviewed by two referees who both recommended publication following minor revision. One of the reviewers noted that the abstract contained a vague statement related to the… - Case
How many “mistakes” are too many?
We published a randomised trial by six authors. Some years later, we received a letter from a researcher who had been looking into the trial in the context of a meta-analysis. She noted “implausibilities of serious concern”, including “a highly unusual balance in the distribution of baseline characteristics”, 95% CIs that were non-symmetrical about the effect estimate, and use of a… - Case
Online posting of confidential draft by peer reviewer
Shortly before publication, I received an email from the authors of a systematic review telling me that a version of the paper as first submitted to the journal for peer review had appeared on the website of a campaign group based in the USA. It was clear that the version of the document posted on the website was the same as the version supplied to the journal's peer reviewers. Further investig… - Case
Stolen article
At acceptance but before publication, we found article A submitted to journal A was highly similar to article B, published 5 months earlier in conference proceedings in journal B by another publisher. The abstracts were nearly identical, but the author lists and affiliations did not overlap. We asked the authors to explain this and they said article A is their own work, but it was inadvertently… - Case
Citing a retracted paper
Our journal has recently retracted three articles after one author was found by their institution to have fabricated data and destroyed evidence. It appears that the one author acted alone; no evidence has been found of complicity by coauthors, and the institution found some evidence suggesting that the one author defrauded their coauthors. We would like to know whether future articles can cite… Seminars
…">Download [PDF 25kB] A report of the COPE European Seminar by Shreeya Nanda [BioMed Central] posted on the BioMed Central blog site and linked to here with their permission. Presentations at the 2013 Asia-Pacific Seminar (- News
COPE collaboration with FORCE11 Working Group
…href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/prometheus.36.2.0116?seq=1">research assessing data policies at journals across a number of disciplines. The authors looked at the information sharing policies of 150 journals and publishers from 15 disciplines to understand the levels of different data sharing policies in different fields. Our collaboration with the FORCE11 WG allows us to continue our work supporting editors and publishers in handling ethical considerations… - Case
Institution alleges that paper includes fabricated data
In 2014 we received a communication from the Research Integrity Officer of an academic institution informing us that a paper, published in our journal in 2013, included falsified or fabricated data. We were informed that, following an investigation, they had determined that scientific misconduct had occurred. Within a few days we received a communication from one of the authors of the pa… - Case
The ethics of self-experimentation
The author was the subject of his study. He depleted himself of a vital nutrient until he had overt clinical and biochemical signs of the deficiency. He monitored various biochemical parameters as he became more deficient and submitted two manuscripts presenting his results: one detailing the biochemical changes and one detailing the differences in results obtained from different commercially a… - 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…