Conflict of interest

The editor of an international journal is bothered: he has received a gift that looks expensive, though it might not be.

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 competitor, who then used some of their findings in a paper subsequently published in journal B, without either attribution or citation.

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 zoomorphology and our paper’s conclusions were based on analysis using a non-invasive technique while the rebuttal relied on more traditional techniques.

Our company publishes clinical pathways.
它们最初是由当地专家撰写的，但如果可能的话，已经用证据进行了改进。这是由专家“evidologists”完成的，而不是临床专家；他们仅以公司名称（这是“外包”）进行确认。如果证据不符，这条路就被丢弃了。

Approximately 1 year after publication of an article, we received a letter from one of the authors saying that they had not seen the reviews of the paper, the revisions of the paper or approved the final manuscript for publication.

We publish “mini-reviews” of published articles. Our faculty of eminent researchers and clinicians write these evaluations. One of the conditions we insist on from our faculty is that they may not evaluate work on which they are an author. We received a review of a paper, the authorship of which was listed as:

名字A，名字B，名字C；研究组X

As the reviewer was a member of “study group X”, we rejected the submission. The reviewer wrote back claiming that:

During peer review of a manuscript submitted to journal Y, one of the referees indicated a belief that at least one of the authors had not declared a relevant conflict of interest (CoI). The article indicated that the authors had no relevant CoIs. The referee provided a URL to a press release that supported the allegation. It appears that one of the authors is the discoverer of a series of compounds that are the subject of the article. The compounds have been licensed to a company.

An online post-publication literature evaluation service, aiming to highlight the best articles in medicine, received an evaluation of an article whose authors were based at the same institution as the evaluator. The editor asked the contributor if he/she had any involvement in the study and received the following response: “I am based at the university but did not participate in the design of the study. I occasionally cross-covered some of the patients when a co-author was out of town”.

An online post-publication literature evaluation service, aiming to highlight the best articles in medicine, received an evaluation of an article on which the evaluator was listed as an author on PubMed. The editor queried the evaluation and the evaluator replied explaining s/he had no involvement with the study but had commented on it.

An associate editor received a letter claiming harassment (from an author from another country) by the editor. The author submitted a manuscript which was repeatedly sent back for changes in format but not rejected. Eventually, the author withdrew the article and submitted it to another international peer reviewed journal with a good impact factor where it was accepted immediately with high priority.