- Case
Plagiarism in a case report
I received a phone call from the first Author (A) of a case report published in our journal in 2005, who informed us that he had received a letter from an Author (B) of a research letter which had been published in another journal in 2000, stating that 12–15 sentences from the research letter had been copied in the case report. Having compared the papers, about… - Case
Inadequate reporting of a trial, despite earlier rejection from a different journal
We have been contacted by a reviewer after he spotted a paper he had reviewed for us (journal 1) now published in a second journal (journal 2). Both journals are members of COPE. The reviewer had advised we reject the paper when it was sent to him to review in September 2008. This was based on his assessment of the paper and also the supplementary material he was sent by us: protocol, CONSORT s… - Case
Change in author’s name after publication
…publications are traced back to this unique identifier. On a show of hands, the majority (15) of the Forum said they would not change the name and 10 said they would.… - Case
Author disagreement blocks submission
A paper was submitted to a medical journal reporting original research on human subjects. Two corresponding authors, author A (first in authors’ list) and author B (last in the list) were listed. The paper was sent to external referees but while it was under review, the editor received an email from author A stating that s/he had not read the paper, was not aware of the submission and did not a… - 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 (