Getting it right: What editors look out for

1. Getting it right: What editors look out for Margaret Rees Reader Emeritus in Reproductive Medicine, University of Oxford Visiting Professor, University of Glasgow, Karolinska Institute and University of Turku Adjunct Associate ProfessorRobert Wood Johnson Medical School, at Rutgers University. Editor in Chief Maturitas Editor in Chief Case Reports in Women’s Health

2. Screening and assessment • Plagiarism • Contributors: Gift, dropped, fake authors • Misleading competing interest/ funding statements • Funding statement accuracy • Data fabrication/ falsification • Duplicate/ salami slice submissions • Reporting/ Clinical trial registration/ prior power calculations • Fake peer reviewers or those with a COI proposed • In context of the China/ Iran bazaar and hoax and sting papers • AND • Ethical approval/ consent • Confidentiality/ privacy/ identifiers/ data sharing

3. Plagiarism “I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:Plagiarize!Plagiarize!Let no one else's work evade your eyes!Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!So don't shade your eyes,But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -Only be sure always to call it please 'research'." Lehrer is a singer-songwriter who accompanied himself on the piano. He is best known for the songs that he recorded in the 1950s and 1960 (while also lecturing on mathematics at Harvard among other colleges).

4. Submissions are checked for overlap with iThenticate but this will not pick up simultaneous submissions and here editors rely on peer reviewers.

6. Predatory journals and publishers/ prior publication • Predatory publishers: over 1,000 • Things to look out for: • The publisher's owner is identified as the editor of each and every journal published by the organization. • No single individual is identified as any specific journal's editor. • The journal does not identify a formal editorial / review board. • No academic information is provided regarding the editor, editorial staff, and/or review board members (e.g., institutional affiliation). ...... • Editorial board members in the wrong field or dead ( eg Sir Richard Doll) or fake • https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/taken down Jan 2017 but archive still available • https://beallslist.weebly.com/last updated 23 March 2019

7. Duplicate submission and a predatory journal • Following repeated requests to revise a paper after peer review, one of the authors contacts the editor stating that the manuscript has been published in their journal ie journal A. Peer review had taken one month. • Investigation shows that the paper has been published but, in another journal ie journal B. The paper had been submitted to journal B one week after the original submission to journal A. • Journal B is considered to be a predatory journal and the named editor in chief has been dead for several years. • What should the editor do?

8. Contributor/author • An “author” is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study, and biomedical authorship continues to have important academic, social, and financial implications. An author must take responsibility for at least one component of the work, should be able to identify who is responsible for each other component, and should ideally be confident in their co-authors’ ability and integrity • Authorship credit should be based on • 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; • 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and • 3) final approval of the version to be published. • Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3. • Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship. • http://www.icmje.org/ethical_1author.html • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

9. The CRediT Roleshttps://www.casrai.org/credit.html • ​Conceptualization • ​Data curation • Formal analysis • Funding acquisition ​ • ​Investigation • ​Methodology • Project administration ​ • ​Resources • ​Software • ​Supervision • ​Validation • ​Visualization • ​Writing – original draft ​ • Writing – review & editing

10. Contributor/ Authorship misconduct • Gift eg head of department automatically put on even though no contribution • Ghost eg medical writer • Dropped • Added • Dead • Fake and joke authors • "The final draft came back and all we had was a red circle around my boss’ name and an arrow that pointed to the front of the authorship list.” Times Higher Education 30 November 2017

11. Fake authors • Astrophysics professor Christian Ott, who was investigated by the California Institute of Technology in 2015 for harassing two female graduate students in his research group, was also investigated for creating a name and email address for an imaginary female researcher. • “Ursula,” “U.C.T.,” or “Uschi” Gamma was listed as a co-author with Ott on two papers in 2012 and 2013, respectively, and was mentioned in the acknowledgements of nine other papers between 2012 to 2014. ("Finally, we thank Ursula C. T. Gamma for continued inspiration,” one said.) • The name and Yahoo email address, which was used in public correspondence with researchers at other institutions, were listed on a Caltech website until 2015, when the investigation began.

12. Joke authors

13. Changes to authorship • Authors are expected to consider carefully the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the original submission. To request a change, the Editor must receive the following from the corresponding author: (a) the reason for the change in author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed.Only in exceptional circumstances will the Editor consider the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. • While the Editor considers the request, publication of the manuscript will be suspended. • If the manuscript has already been published in an online issue, any requests approved by the Editor will result in a corrigendum.

14. Conflict of interest (ICMJE: financial and non financial http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/author-responsibilities--conflicts-of-interest.html • A conflict of interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients' welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest. • Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself. • However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, and intellectual beliefs. • Authors should avoid entering in to agreements with study sponsors, both for-profit and non-profit, that interfere with authors’ access to all of the study’s data or that interfere with their ability to analyze and interpret the data and to prepare and publish manuscripts independently when and where they choose. • NOT TO STATE MEANS THAT READERS COULD BE DECEIVED • ICMJE has a standard form

15. Funding • You are requested to identify who provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement then this should be stated. • Lack of provision could be construed as trying to deceive readers. • Elsevier http://www.maturitas.org/content/authorinfo#idp1622656

16. Clinical trial registration • Registration in a public trials registry is a condition for publication of clinical trials in this journal in accordance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommendations. • Trials must register at or before the onset of patient enrolment. The clinical trial registration number should be included at the end of the abstract of the article. • A clinical trial is defined as any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects of health outcomes. • Health-related interventions include any intervention used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome (for example drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, dietary interventions, and process-of-care changes). • Health outcomes include any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants, including pharmacokinetic measures and adverse events. • Purely observational studies (those in which the assignment of the medical intervention is not at the discretion of the investigator) will not require registration.

17. Clinical trial reporting • Randomized controlled trials should be presented according to the CONSORT guidelines. At manuscript submission, authors must provide the CONSORT checklist accompanied by a flow diagram that illustrates the progress of patients through the trial, including recruitment, enrollment, randomization, withdrawal and completion, and a detailed description of the randomization procedure. • The CONSORT checklist and template flow diagram are available online.

18. Fake peer reviewers • In August 2015, the publisher Springer retracted 64 articles from 10 different subscription journals “after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports,” according to a statement on their website. • The retractions came only months after BioMed Central, an open-access publisher also owned by Springer, retracted 43 articles for the same reason. • Peter Chen, in Taiwan, constructed a “peer review and citation ring” in which he used 130 bogus e-mail addresses and fabricated identities to generate fake reviews. An editor at one of the journals published by Sage Publications became suspicious, sparking a lengthy and comprehensive investigation, which resulted in the retraction of 60 articles in July 2014. • Editors faked reviewers emails (Hindawi)

19. https://www.slideshare.net/ivanoransky/fake-peer-review-what-weve-learned-at-retraction-watchhttps://www.slideshare.net/ivanoransky/fake-peer-review-what-weve-learned-at-retraction-watch

20. Fake peer reviewers? • After 3 months of failing to find reviewers to accept to look at a paper, the editor approaches those suggested by the authors. The paper has been written by people whose first language is not English. • The suggested reviewers are well known academics who are native English speakers based in UK and US institutions. There is no known conflict of interest. • Within 24 hours favourable peer review comments are received. Both reports contain the same turn of phrase and have many grammatical and typographical errors.

21. China Bazaar • A Science investigation has uncovered a smorgasbord of questionable practices including paying for author's slots on papers written by other scientists and buying papers from online brokers. • MARA HVISTENDAHL, SCIENCE 29 NOV 2013 : 1035-1039 • DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6162.1035

22. China Bazaar • Companies prepare original papers from scratch with data provided by their clients or fabricate data, arrange to add scientists’ names to already accepted papers, and sell finished manuscripts. • Among the most popular options for finished manuscripts are meta-analyses, perhaps because they require no original data. One legitimate analysis published in PLOS ONE in June 2013 found that from 2003 to 2011, meta-analysis papers from China rose more than 16 times faster than did such papers from the United States. • Copycat papers with similar phrases....... • http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2014/10/copycat-papers-flag-continuing-headache-china

24. Hoax paper

25. Sting paper

27. Sting paper? • A journal editor receives a paper from an unknown institution claiming that wearing tight underwear increases the risk of breast and testicular cancer. • It is a cohort study undertaken by a group of epidemiologists and the department of engineering who measured the elastic modulus of the underwear. • How should the editor proceed?

28. https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/653885/Ethics-in-research-and-publication-brochure.pdfhttps://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/653885/Ethics-in-research-and-publication-brochure.pdf

30. Conclusion • Papers need to be screened before sending for peer review • A need for author education • A need for reviewer education