Table 2 Potential publication related misconduct
From: Unethical practices within medical research and publication – An exploratory study
Misconduct | Details | Individuals involved |
|---|---|---|
Convenient ethical clearance | 1. Ambiguous details in ethical application with room for varied interpretation about study details. 2. Backdated ethical approval, after the study | Usually at the institutional or departmental level. |
Selective use of data | Deliberately ignoring or hiding findings to enhance impact of the publication | Academics and PIs |
Maximising mentorship privileges | Using junior academics to carry out or help in expanding own research or offloading teaching duties to mentees. | PIs and professors |
Authorship by demand | Demanding authorship from mentees’ work or publications without any input into the research | PIs and professors |
Authorship by default | Expecting certain individuals (such as professors, post-doctoral fellows) to have authorships in every single manuscript produced with a laboratory | Mainly academics and professors |
Malpractices in grant selection | Selecting applications from mentees or collaborators to offer internal funding | At institutional level |
Delaying review or decisions | Purposely delaying reviewer decisions to make sure their (reviewers) papers are published first. | Established reviewers |
Reciprocal reviewing | Agreement between academics to be a “friendly” reviewer on manuscripts of each other. | Established reviewers |
Indirect identification | Authors purposely identifying themselves within manuscript by quoting their previous publications (by using terms as “Our previous study has shown”, paving the way to identify them in the reference section) | Amongst academics and PIs |