2005
Search results
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Dual submission
05-20 A referee’s report on a paper informed this editor that the authors had submitted a very similar paper to another journal. Both papers analyse the same 30 cases of an unusual neoplasm, and the tables and five of the ...
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Ethics, institutional review and studies from private practice
05-24 A manuscript was submitted to our journal regarding a chart review of a novel treatment of a musculoskeletal disease, done at a private clinic in a western country. The patients had given informed consent for the novel treatment, ...
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Duplicate publication
05-23 A reader contacted the editorial staff of Journal A after noticing that Journal B, which is primarily non-English, had published a paper that was remarkably similar. The editor of journal A contacted the editor of Journal B. ...
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Editor as author in own journal
05-22 This journal specialises in one form of treatment. It is the only Medline listed journal that is widely accessed in Europe by people who use this form of treatment. No international journals provide a suitable alternative. In the ...
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Ownership of an idea
05-21 A paper was submitted describing a novel technique for preparing tissue, which was noted immediately by a referee to be a modification of a method used by another researcher. The other researcher is thanked but is not included in ...
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A case report of an experimental therapy, submitted by the patient
05-10 We received a pre-submission enquiry about whether we were interested in publishing a case report of a novel therapy that provided “a complete cure for heart disease.” The therapy involved a “membranotrophic drug” combined with ...
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Sufficient consent?
05-16 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 ...
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Allegation of fraudulent publication
05-15 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 ...
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Duplicate publication
05-14 In 2003 a paper was published in a specialist surgical journal following proper peer review. The paper summarised the experience of a group of clinicians concerned in treating malignancy in the Head and Neck using a novel method ...
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No control group, arbitrary dosage, undiagnosed condition
05-12 In summary, we have a case series, with no control group, of patients with different conditions treated for an undiagnosed underlying condition with an arbitrarily prescribed dosage of a drug which is not registered for treating ...
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Suspected plagiarism
05-11 We had a case of suspected plagiarism recently on one of our journals, on which I would appreciate COPE’s advice. The case has been resolved, so this is not in the least urgent, but I would be interested to hear your views. ...
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“Medical research” using data in the public domain
05-09 Information on competitors participating in a popular sporting activity was obtained from a website in the public domain. The authors used this data to see if the competitors' personal characteristics (height, weight etc.) ...
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Plagiarism
05-08 A review article by an expert group plagiarised an article from another journal. It was largely a direct translation, involving large slabs of the text. Some of the authors are on the editorial board of the journal where the paper ...
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Salami publication
05-07 A paper submitted to Journal A was rejected after critical peer review. Although the data and methods were sound, the data in the paper were not new and had been described, at least in part, in previous publications. The authors ...
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Ethical approval procedural lapse
05-06 An observational study submitted to an institutional journal was sent for peer review. The authors were invited to submit a revision six months later. They did so, but had not responded fully to the reviewers' points, so they ...
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Foreign language duplicate publication
05-05 A paper was published in an Italian language journal, together with an English abstract. A second paper was submitted to a UK journal, one of whose referees spotted the similar content. ...
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Sanitising a misleading statement
05-04 Author A published a paper in Journal X, which presented evidence of failure by another research group to declare a serious conflict of interest in a paper that had been published some years before in Journal Y. This conflict of ...
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Attempted duplicate publication
05-03 A reviewer informed Journal A that a manuscript s/he had been asked to review was very similar to one s/he had reviewed for Journal B. The lead author was informed about this and told the editors would come back to him after ...
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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 ...
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Dual publication
05-01 An English language journal received a study describing a randomised controlled trial. The paper was accepted and published several months later. Five months after its publication the editors were informed that a similar study had ...