An online post-publication literature evaluation service aiming to highlight the best papers in medicine, received an evaluation of a basic science study funded by an NIHM grant. The evaluator declared in his/her competing interests that he/she is the director of a project that included the evaluated study as one of its components. The overall project was funded by an NIHM grant and paid the salary of the study’s first author. The evaluator did not supervise the study or write the paper. As competing interests were declared, the editor decided to publish the evaluation.
编辑在一场编辑会议上介绍了这种情况，提高了以下问题：
Can we accept this evaluation considering the evaluator is the director of the overall project and may gain from promoting this study’s results?
The meeting made the following decision:
由于宣布了相互竞争的利益，会议认为我们可以继续发表评价。
Competing interests declaration: I am the director of the grant that paid some of the expenses for the conduct of this study, including the first author’s salary. I did not supervise the work or write the paper, as you can see I am not a co-author. If you look at the paper, it indicates the financial support of a NIMH grant. I am the director of the overall project that included a component directed by the first author that conducted this study.
Would you have taken a different course of action? In particular, do you think it was right to publish the evaluation and is the declaration of interests sufficient in its current form?
We had a presubmission enquiry from a group regarding a paper reporting what seemed to be an uncontrolled trial in infertile women who were given soft tissue physical therapy. The authors wanted to know if we would be interested in their paper; if it was a problem that the trial had not been registered (because, they claimed, it was not a trial as no control group was used); and if it was a problem that ethical approval had not been gained (apparently, because the intervention was not a “medical” one).
As the authors were working for a private company, the advice was to pursue the issue along regulatory authority lines. The editor could write to the medical boards of the authors or the regulatory authorities at the state level. Another avenue could be to contact RESOLVE–The National Infertility Association in the US. The committee questioned if this was in fact a trial, and as there was no patient consent, could there be assault issues?
Follow up:
We wrote back to the authors explaining our concerns and asking for a response. The authors said that they did not think they had violated any legal or ethical requirements (in that they thought IRB approval was only required for entities regulated by the federal government, and not private physical therapy clinics). The authors also claimed their work was not experimental, so it is questionable whether this really was a trial. We plan to write to the authors to say that we cannot consider the study, and that any future research they do in humans should be approved by an appropriate ethics committee. We also plan to write to the state medical boards regarding the involvement of the medical practitioners who were involved in this research.
An online post-publication literature evaluation service aiming to highlight the best articles in medicine has received evaluation of articles published in supplement issues of journals. Given that many supplements are funded by pharmaceutical companies, should we have a different policy on how to handle such evaluations? If so, what suggestions do you have?
建议：
The committee felt that it is not necessary to dismiss supplements out of hand as some can be very informative (published abstracts, non-commercial supplements). On the other hand, some members of the committee felt that the conflict of interest combined with the commercial interests of the pharmaceutical companies should deter publication of any evaluations of supplements. The majority view, however, was that a different policy for supplements is not necessary, as long the sponsorship and conflict of interest issues are transparent. It should be made clear if funding is received from pharmaceutical companies.
As the author has clearly stated that the data are correct, and the only dispute is a small section of the paper that was published without permission, the committee felt that a retraction is not necessary. As the degree of overlap is so small, this is unlikely to constitute duplicate submission. The second paper could cite the first paper and make a note that the data were published previously in error. The journal could publish a correction or an acknowledgement but the committee felt that the editor should hold firm and not agree to a retraction. The committee felt that contacting the author’s institution was not necessary in this instance.
This is regarding a case of suspected plagiarism in our journal. I as editor have received a manuscript which was published by me in our January 2006 issue and on subsequent follow up after availability of plagiarism detection software the manuscript - a review article - seems to have a lot of similarities to another article written in a website and though the language is not the same -the flow of the article and the subheadings and the text is too similar.It was pointed out to me by my associate editor.There have been no complains yet but does that mean one should not investigate?Is the editor entitled to conduct investigations without complaints.Can plagiarism detection software be applied retrospectively?What action can be taken if only ideas are copied in the same sequence though the article is not copied verbatim.The photographs seem to be same but captions different.Should this be investigated further?How?
We had a paper submitted reporting results of a randomized trial. The trial seemed to look at immune responses in lung fluid in participants receiving either a particular vaccine or placebo. We got a copy of the trial protocol before going to peer review as per our normal editorial policy, and made sure the trial was registered.
One reviewer pointed out major discrepancies (principally in sample size and outcome measures) between the trial report, and the protocol document and registration record. We asked the authors to revise and to explain why these discrepancies had happenned. The authors explained that that the protocol and registry record originally sent were actually for a totally different study, and they had now separately registered the trial reported here. They also sent a new protocol document apparently now corresponding to the study in question.
Misrepresentation in the original manuscript. Our assumption when we see the report of a trial is that, unless it is presented as a secondary, follow up, or other type of ancillary or nested analysis, then the report describes all of the main aspects outlined in the approved protocol. This wasn't the case here, but how serious is this? Is it a form of scientific misconduct and if so who should we report it to? (The ethics committee may not care - are there any "rules" that a trial, once approved, has to be published in the form it's approved?)
At this point we are considering rejecting the paper essentially on the grounds of protocol deviations, and sending all relevant documents and correspondence to the ethics committees (who are already aware of the issues raised).
The paper was rejected. The editor wrote to the chairs of both ethics committees enclosing a copy of the paper and protocol documents. The Director of Publishing dealt with the author’s complaint about the editor, and wrote back to the author to uphold the editor’s handling of the paper. We did not hear back from one of the chairs of the ethics committees but the editor did speak to the other chair, who felt that we had not understood the realities of conducting clinical research, in which protocols may change. We decided not to go to the authors’ institution to pursue this case further.
After peer-review, a general medical journal published a household survey of violence following a coup against the country’s elected President.该调查显示出高水平的暴力和人权滥用，只有少数少数群体归因于所吸引制度的支持者。稿件表示，没有一个面试官没有政治附属机构，而作者宣布他们没有利益冲突。
The author admitted that she had done this and the co-author, her thesis supervisor, stated that he was aware of these facts and did not consider them a conflict of interest.
In response to credible allegations that one author’s former activities might constitute an undisclosed conflict of interest, the journal began an inquiry. The authors’ institution was asked to investigate the matter, and the issue was referred to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
To realise their full potential to benefit populations, research findings must influence practice. Intelligent debate is part of that process. The journal encourages genuine debate, and will always consider seriously allegations of scientific misconduct. It is unfortunate, however, that in this case much of the debate was aimed at exploiting historical divisions in有关国家。这一过程掩盖了作者研究的信息，损害了该国平民福利这一真正问题，现在应该把注意力转向这个问题。
委员会的建议是写的身份验证or’s institution, reporting the behaviour of the authors. The committee agreed with the editor that it is most likely that the authors mislead the editors on this occasion as they must have signed two letters on the same day stating that the article had not been submitted to another journal.
Follow up:
The editor wrote to the authors but received a very unsatisfactory reply. The editor reported back to the editorial board. The editor has decided not to accept any submissions from these authors for the next two years.
远东集团发表的一篇文章our journal in November 2005. We were later alerted by an interested reader that the same article, slightly changed, was published in an American journal. I contacted the American journal and the article will now be officially retracted from that journal. Part of the explanation could be poor communication between the authors, but I am not sure this is the whole truth. Two of the authors accept guilt but are now asking that the others not be “punished”.
The committee agreed with the editor that it is unlikely that this was “an honest mistake” or misunderstanding on the part of the authors. It is most likely that the two papers were submitted for publication at the same time. The advice was to contact the author’s head of department informing him of the situation and asking him to consider investigating the case. Other advice offered was to contact the American journal and ask them if the authors had stated in a letter that the paper had not been published previously.
The editor of the journal confirmed at the committee meeting that no reply has been received from the author and that the paper is no longer on hold as the journal has decided not to publish. The editor is pursuing the head of the institution in question. The committee commented that the correct course is being pursued, in accordance with COPE’s flowchart on “Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript”.
Follow up:
The editor wrote to the prospective Middle Eastern author (who submitted two papers which had been copied from papers published previously by other authors) and to the head of his institution, without reply.
One might have hoped that the individual in question would have realised that detection was inevitable, but it appears not. After the author had been contacted by the editor by email, one of the plagiarised papers was published in a peer reviewed pathology journal (although not one indexed in Pubmed).
我们建议联系讨论期刊的编辑 - 在英国提醒他们的情况下，有一个欧洲编辑，并要求他们调查。
Should we also contact the plagiarisees and/or the journal their paper was published in?
有关跟进的建议：
The Forum agreed with the editor’s course of action to contact the editors of the journal. The Forum also supported contacting the author, as well as the wronged authors whose work was plagiarised and the wronged journal where their paper was published.
然后我们联系the editor and European editor of the pathology journal (the former apparently a Brigadier by day), who responded with shock and regret. The offending (plagiarised) paper has been removed from their website, and a note is going to be published in a forthcoming printed copy of the journal to explain the situation. We have drawn the COPE website to the editors’ attention for future reference.
更新（2008年2月） The editor considers the case now closed.