Research integrity/ethics investigations

The authors of a paper are in disagreement over whether the paper should be retracted. One group of authors (group 1) wishes to publish a correction, and another group (group 2) feel that is inadequate, and the paper should be retracted. Group 2 is concerned that one of the authors, author X, in group 1 is guilty of scientific misconduct. The remaining group 1 authors do not support this claim.

裁判的报告上的一篇论文通知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 photomicrographs are identical. There is also considerable duplication of text in the article.

We have written to the authors requesting them to clarify how this has arisen and told them that when such duplication arises it is regarded as tantamount to fraud.

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, but there was no ethical approval.

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 any of the conditions nor the undiagnosed underlying condition. I rejected the paper for publication and let the author know that the ethics committee of the journal will review the paper.

A review article was spontaneously submitted and sent out to three peer reviewers, which is standard practice for the journal. One of these reviewers expressed “serious concerns” about the paper. In a telephone conversation, s/he explained that the structure (headings, subheadings, etc), large “chunks of the text,” and most of the references had been plagiarised from a teaching syllabus that s/he had written for a recent teaching session on the same subject.

Dr X asked for a statement to be published to the effect that the letter he had published in the journal with two co-authors was not based on any work that he had done, but on that of his colleagues. The editor asked the other two authors why they had signed a copyright form in these circumstances. Both authors stated that they had not signed any such form, and when presented with a copy, stated that their signatures had been forged.

Several years after a case series was published, a journalist with serious allegations of research misconduct contacted the editor. These allegations were that: - Ethics approval had not been obtained, contrary to a statement in the paper; and that the reported study was completed under the cover of ethics approval granted to a different study - Contrary to a statement in the paper that the participants had been consecutively referred, they were, in fact, invited to participate.

A review article was submitted by three authors from three separate institutions to Journal A. It was sent out to two referees. One of the referees noticed an apparent similarity with a review published a year earlier in Journal B, but written by two completely different authors.

Some time after a single authored research article was published a journal received a letter pointing out that the same article had been rejected by another journal because of unresolved authorship and acknowledgement issues. At that time the paper had 12 authors. The correspondent said that the single author had a patent application related to the topic of the paper. This was declared as a competing interest in the published paper.