| Homepage |
| Search |
A recent case of blame on a medical writer and subsequent attempts to make things clear to the public is reported in this article. This offers many hints to reflect on ethical considerations regarding authors, editors, and medical writers. There are also very useful references. The case reported here involved an article published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology and the suggested unethical behaviour of the medical writer. This was debated in Science. A group of medical writers reacted to these unfair appraisals and wrote a letter to Science to clarify their positions, but it was never considered for publication. The Write Stuff, the journal of the European Medical Writers Association, published this correspondence, after taking into account all ethical implications regarding the publication of such correspondence. Rich MW. Plagiarism in an article: Is there any evidence? Medical Hypotheses 2007; 69:1154–1162. (doi: 10.1016/m.mehy.2007.05.039) The authors of a published paper "relied heavily" on one of the author's earlier publications, thereby violating the other authors' copyright. In an apologetic reply, published without editing (pp 1155-6; doi 10.1016/jmehy.2007.06.024), the Chinese authors say: "The full understanding of citation model as well as language problem (English is not native language) for us may also be principle reasons for those mistakes." Godlee F. Plagiarism and punishment. BMJ 2007;335 (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39392.602523.47) Plagiarism is listed, in the US Office for Research Integrity’s definition of research misconduct, as one of the three high crimes of research fraud. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) lists 18 cases of plagiarism from 1998 to 2005, but it is likely that there has been a higher number. COPE has also a series of flow charts that outline what journals should do if editors suspect plagiarism. Even if in the end everyone still relies on academic institutions, that too often still fails, as in the case of an eminent Croatian clinician and academic, which cast a cloud on the Croatian research community. © Copyright 2008 by European Association of Science Editors Top of Page |
|
|