Publication Ethics R.Raveendran Chief Editor, Journal of Pharmacology & Pharmacotherapeutics

Code of conduct for contributors to biomedical journals Publication Ethics

Why should we bother? “every single case of fraud and misconduct reduces public confidence, abuses the use of public and charitable funds and causes insult and frustration to the vast majority of careful and honest workers” (The Joint Consensus on Misconduct in Biomedical Research, Edinburgh 1999).

Is violation of publication ethics common?

Nature 435, (9 June 2005)

Reasons for violating publication ethics Unintentional  Ignorance  Getting trapped Intentional  Publish or Perish  Job  Promotion  Grant  Instant fame (followed by shame)

Unethical publication practices  Multiple submission  Guest Authorship  Fudging the content/data  Undeclared conflicts of interest  Redundant publication  Plagiarism  Inappropriate acknowledgements

Manuscript Submission  Don’t submit to more than one journal at a time  Final version should have been read by all the authors  Don’t submit without the consent/knowledge of the co-author(s)

Authorship  not giving authorship to those who have made significant intellectual contribution.  giving authorship to those when they have NOT made significant intellectual contribution.  refusing to take public responsibility for the study or at least particular section of the study after the publication

Contents of manuscript A manuscript must present the truth, nothing but the truth and the whole truth.  intentionally hiding crucial information  making false statements  intentional alteration of data  misquoting others work  not quoting previous important works  too many self citations  publishing photographs of patients without consent  not concealing the identity of patients (in the text as well as the photographs)

Conflict of interests Conflict of interest has been defined as "a set of conditions in which professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients' welfare or the validity of research) tends to be unduly influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain).“ It is a condition not a behavior, and there is nothing wrong with having a conflict of interest. It is common. -BMJ

Conflict of interests  commercial  political  personal  academic  Financial Do NOT forget to declare competing interests

Redundant Publication (Duplicate Publication; Dual Publication)  Do not publish the same data/paper again and again  If you have to (!), inform the editors and take permission Salami slicing?

Plagiarism  Plagiarism is stealing others ideas and contents of a paper (written or illustrative material) and passing it as ones own.  Copying large portions verbatim from other papers is plagiarism even if references are given

Acknowledgements  Acknowledge the funding / sponsoring agency  Don’t acknowledge routine work or duty  Acknowledging the Head of the Institution

A faculty member in a medical college received an acknowledgement from a journal for submitting a research paper. The faculty member replied to the editor that she did not submit any paper and hence she cannot take any responsibility for the paper. It was found that her former student submitted the paper without her knowledge. The work was carried out in her lab and the student included her name as a corresponding author.

A manuscript which was submitted to a journal was found to include a large chunk of data published already by the author in a journal. When asked, the author explained that he has used only a part of the data published already and added some new data to make one more manuscript.

In a review submitted for publication, it was found that a few paragraphs were copied verbatim from another review published earlier in another journal. When the author was asked to explain, he said he had listed those articles under references and cited them in the running text and hence he can use the paragraphs word by word in his review.

An author submitted a paper with partial data when whole data were available. After publication he submitted the entire data to the drug control authority with a conclusion different from the one he drew in the paper published in the journal.

When a paper was about to be published, the authors wrote to the editor of IJP that he would like to withdraw the paper. The reason given was that he submitted the paper to another journal earlier but he did not hear from them for a long time. His reminding letters were not replied. Hence, he decided to submit the paper to the IJP but he subsequently found that the paper was published in the journal he first submitted and hence the withdrawal.

A research work on usefulness of a particular type of exercise in patients with diabetes mellitus was submitted to journal. On finding no mention about the ethics committee permission, the editor of the journal asked for a clarification. The authors replied that they have taken informed consent from all and argued that since the study did not involve any intervention, there was no need for ethics committee permission.

A paper published by a senior researcher contained fabricated data. When the editor asked the researcher she admitted the data were false but her junior did it without her knowledge. Her statement found to be true on enquiry.

After the results of a clinical trial of a drug was published in a journal, a colleague of the authors wrote to the editor saying that the study was fully funded by a drug company but the information was not revealed in the paper.

The number of original publications came out of from a college in the year 2011 was 107. More than 100 papers included the college principal as the last author. Almost every paper included the respective HoD as one of the authors.

After a paper was published in a journal, the editor received a letter from two workers belonging to the dept from which the paper originated that the data published in the paper were collected by them in a field survey and they were not given authorship.

Thank you

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