一个评论家发现论文对于revi收到ew was almost identical to a paper published by the same group three years earlier in a journal of a different specialty. The paper concerned clinical and investigative aspects of a disease that crossed two specialties. Although the authors had included their previous paper in the reference list, the title of the paper had been changed from that in the other journal. References to this in the introduction and discussion were brief in the extreme and did not indicate in any way that the authors were re-studying, or re-reporting the same patients or data set.
An author submitted a review to journal A in February 1997. It was accepted for publication in November, after peer review. The same author submitted a review on a similar topic—sufficiently similar that there was substantial overlap of content—to journal B in September 1997. Journal B accepted it in January 1998, after peer review. Neither journal editor knew of the parallel paper.
杂志B 1998年3月发表了审查。期刊A的编辑看到了这篇论文并联系了作者。提交人声称，在1997年的谈判期间，A展示了A曾导致他相信他的审查是不可接受的出版物。然后联系了Journal B.
Two of the journals asked the chief executives of the organisations to investigate.They did, and found that things had not been done correctly. However, they did not think that any sanctions were necessary, but they revised their guidelines on authorship.
The paper discussed the use of drug X in condition Y, submitted to journal A. It is a double blind randomised controlled trial, presenting the 1 year result in 129 women. It finds that drug X helps in condition Y. The authors published a similar paper in journal B, 2 months before submission of this paper to journal A. The journal B paper studied the same question in 601 women with a 2 year follow-up. The only new feature in the journal A paper is that all the women have a level of index greater than 1 standard deviation below the mean. The journal B study included those between -2.2 and +2.0 standard deviations. There was therefore some overlap of the inclusion criteria in the two trials. The journal A paper does not make explicitly clear whether the women described form part of a subgroup of the cohort discussed in journal B. In fact, they make only passing reference to that paper, but do not discuss its relation to the paper they are submitting to journal A. The authors did not supply a copy of the journal B paper when submitting the journal A paper. What should we do now?
I received a letter from a reader in November 1997, pointing out that a paper published in the BMJ in 1996 was substantially the same as a paper published in another journal in 1994. We have examined both papers and discovered: (1) The papers describe the same cohort. There are the same numbers of patients, recruited in the same year; they have the same range of starting and finishing blood pressures. They are give the same drugs in the same hospital and had the same length of follow-up. The same outcomes are presented in both papers. (2) There is no lifting of text verbatim. (3) No substantially different or new material is presented in either paper in comparison with the other. A little more information on deaths and dropouts appeared in the BMJ paper in response to questions by the statistical reviewer. (3) Neither paper was referenced to the other, and the authors did not inform us of the existence of the paper in the other journal. (4) All authors signed the copyright form (5) The BMJ paper includes two authors who were not included in the other paper. This seems a very straightforward case of redundant publication. We have asked the authors for an explanation, and our expectation is that we will need to publish a notice of redundant publication. I have also written to the editor of the other journal.