reviewer misconduct

When reviewers: fail to treat submissions in confidence use information for their own benefit from a submission they have been asked to review (e.g. reporting data as if it were their own, plagiarising text, stealing data or ideas and using them in grant applications) try to delay publications from rivals/competitors submit a biased review or inappropriate recommendations in the hope of preventing or delaying publication by a rival fail to declare competing interests.

Search results

  1. Reviewer asks trainee to review manuscript

    11-29 A known expert in a certain content area was asked to review a manuscript. He asked if one of his trainees (not a content expert) could review the manuscript instead, with some oversight and as a training exercise. He stated that ...

  2. Breach of peer review confidentiality

    10-25 This case concerns a submitted review article that proposes a new theory in a field of research where there are two polarised positions. ...

  3. Suspicion of breach of proper peer reviewer behaviour

    10-26 An author submitted a paper for peer review with journal X on a topic that refers to a very recently published paper (ie, highly timely). The peer review was rather protracted because of long response times, reviewer substitution ...

  4. Parallels between unpublished manuscript and a published article from other authors

    10-24 I am seeking advice on a confidential ‘letter of concern’ from an author (X) of a manuscript submitted before I was appointed editor of the journal but rejected by me on the advice of the associate editor. ...

  5. Plagiarism, double submission and reviewer ethicality

    09-22 This is a complicated case which involves possible plagiarism, double submission and reviewer misconduct. The timeline is as follows:  ...

  6. Reviewer misconduct?

    09-13 We have received threats of legal action from the authors of a manuscript rejected by our journal, henceforth referred to as journal A. These “aggrieved” authors claim that their manuscript was unfairly reviewed by a close ...

  7. The ethics of using privileged information

    09-12 A paper published in one of our journals (paper A) provoked the submission of a correspondence article claiming that a minor conclusion of the paper was a misinterpretation and erroneous. The point in contention was a question of ...

  8. Suspected contact between reviewer and an author led to coauthorship of the reviewer

    09-05 A manuscript was submitted via our electronic submission system and processed in accordance with the standard procedures of the journal. This was originally a single author submission, and in the covering letter the author ...

  9. A breach of confidentiality?

    07-34 We ask our contributors to send us short mini-reviews of interesting articles they have come across in their regular reading. Most of our members also act as peer-reviewers and come across interesting articles as part of the peer ...

  10. Inadvertent discovery of salami submission

    07-28 The journal submitting this case to COPE sent a paper [paper 1] to a reviewer who wrote this in the review: “…That apart, this manuscript seems to be another report of the already published **** trial, looking at the data from a ...

  11. Possible breach of confidentiality by a reviewer

    06-26 One of the figures in an article under review was said by the authors to appear in a presentation given at a conference while the paper was still under review and from this identified the reviewer and accused this person of abusing ...

  12. Accusation of theft of a model

    06-03 During refereeing of an article, one of the referees made an accusation of theft regarding a model described in the article. The referee and the authors had been collaborating on a review article previously, but had fallen out. The ...

  13. Reviewer/author conflict of interest

    05-02 Dr B accepted an invitation to review a manuscript for Journal A. Dr B was aware only of the title of the manuscript and had read the abstract before accepting the invitation. He was also aware that he was to return his review ...