they receive inconclusive evidence of • research or publication misconduct by the authors there is evidence that the findings are • unreliable but the authors’ institution will not investigate the case they believe that an investigation • into alleged misconduct related to the publication either has not been, or would not be, fair and impartial or conclusive an investigation is underway but a •...

Having considered current reports concerning plagiarisms taking place in the global science community, the authors decided to address the principal reasons, which lead to these illegalities. In recent years, misconduct in research, such as plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, guest author, ghost author, self-citation, etc. have been increasing significantly in scientific papers, proving a la...

Sir, the recent publication on “Publication Ethics” is very interesting (1). The article by Fazly Bazzaz and Sadeghi demonstrated many interesting cases of misconducts. Indeed, the misconducts can be seen in many ways. As mentioned in the present publication, both author and editor can perform publication misconducts. Nevertheless, the problem has many more facets. Sometimes, the misconducts ar...

Institutions and journals both have important duties relating to research and publication misconduct. Institutions are responsible for the conduct of their researchers and for encouraging a healthy research environment. Journals are responsible for the conduct of their editors, for safeguarding the research record, and for ensuring the reliability of everything they publish. It is therefore imp...

Though scientific misconduct perpetrated by authors has received much press, little attention has been given to the role of journal editors. This article discusses cases and types of “editorial misconduct”, in which the action or inaction of editorial agents ended in publication of fraudulent work and/or poor or failed retractions of such works, all of which ultimately harm scientific integrity...

BACKGROUND This study was done to determine the prevalence of publication misconduct among Iranian authors. METHODS Data were collected through an email survey of corresponding authors of papers published in Iranian journals indexed in Scopus during 2009-2011. Using the double list experiment, these individuals were indirectly questioned about committing one of the five misconducts including ...

Journals and institutions have important complementary roles to play in cases of suspected research and publication misconduct. Journals should take responsibility for everything they publish and should alert institutions to cases of possible serious misconduct but should not attempt to investigate such cases. Institutions should take responsibility for their researchers and for investigating c...