Medical publishing in 2015: mistakes to be careful to avoid.

In 2009, my surprise at the amount of unethical behavior uncovered during my first 4 years as Editor-in-Chief of CHEST led me to comment on the role of conflict of interest and scientific misconduct in the reporting of scientific information.1 While a very small part of scientific misconduct was determined to be intentional, by far the greater part was deemed unintentional, since it was not intuitively obvious to the participating authors that they had engaged in unethical behavior. A review of the literature undertaken before writing the article suggested that our findings were neither new nor unusual.2 Nevertheless, I decided to go ahead and write the commentary, feeling that it was important to add my voice to that of others who had been trying to restore public trust in research, trust that had been eroded due to a perceived deterioration of professional fidelity and honesty among pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers, investigators, editors and journals, and clinicians.1 Five years later, there is clearly a greater awareness of scientific misconduct and the situation is improving. For example, requirements for trial registration and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) filing have evolved and become more rigorous3,4; the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), representing the country’s leading biopharmaceutical researchers and biotechnology companies, have updated and refined their guidelines on the conduct and reporting of clinical trials5; an increasing number of journals are using software to uncover plagiarism6 and image manipulation7; and the requirement for conflict of interest disclosures by authors has become commonplace. However, while there is a greater awareness of the problem and an increasing number and variety of safeguards have been put in place, we continue to encounter situations that authors should avoid. These can be categorized as careless mistakes, worse than careless mistakes, and mistakes to avoid like the plague. Careless mistakes (see Table 1) are those that have the potential to offend reviewers and editors. While they do not necessarily lead to rejection, they do have the potential to diminish an author’s chances of receiving a favorable review or second chance when there is uncertainty. These mistakes are often a failure