Editors are accountable and should take responsibility for everything they publish. Editors should make fair and unbiased decisions independent from commercial consideration and ensure a fair and appropriate peer review process. Editors should adopt editorial policies that encourage maximum transparency and complete, honest reporting. Editors should guard the integrity of the published record b...

Dear Sirs, In reply to the editorial (1) and two retractions connected with duplicate (2) and triplicate (3) publications recently published in this journal, I would like to inform you that I assume full responsibility for both duplicate and triplicate publication and that I am the sole person responsible for this scientific misconduct. I also additionally confirm that N. Papadopoulos (the corr...

In this paper we explore post retraction citations to retracted papers. The reasons for retractions in our sample were data manipulation, small sample size, scientific misconduct, and duplicate publication by the authors. We found, that the huge majority of the citations are positive, and the citing papers usually fail to mention that the cited article was retracted. Retracted articles are free...

Scientific integrity has always been a critical issue in performing research. Recently, alarming signals from China have reached the academic community in the USA and Europe about scientific misconduct. One of the most respected newspapers in our country (NRC Handelsblad, 11 December 2010) reported that at least one third of leading scientists (2000 out of 6000) allied to one of the six major C...

BACKGROUND The knowledge of scientific dishonesty is scarce and heterogeneous. Therefore this study investigates the experiences with and the attitudes towards various forms of scientific dishonesty among PhD-students at the medical faculties of all Norwegian universities. METHOD Anonymous questionnaire distributed to all post graduate students attending introductory PhD-courses at all medica...

There is no "Method" section in the abstract. On should be added. Response: The abstract follows BMJ Open guidelines and there is no method section (the study design is reported under the design heading). Objectives A sentence summarizing what the COPE guidelines recommend regarding retraction notices should be added in the objective to make the result section understandable to the non-speciali...

We read the publication by Liu (2016) on authorship misconduct with a great interest. In fact, the authorship misconduct is no uncommon and has to be managed. Liu (2016) noted that “Proper authorship embodies honesty, integrity, fairness and transparency, which surely are the very essence of any scientific pursuit.” Due to the present requirement on academic publication to support academic rank...

Corresponding author: Younsuk Lee, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Ilsan Hospital, Dongguk University Medical Center, 814, Siksa-dong, Ilsandong-gu, Goyang 410-773, Korea. Tel: 82-31-961-7872, Fax: 82-31-961-7864, E-mail: [email protected] This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http:// cr...

OBJECTIVES To assess why articles are retracted from BioMed Central journals, whether retraction notices adhered to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, and are becoming more frequent as a proportion of published articles. DESIGN/SETTING Retrospective cross-sectional analysis of 134 retractions from January 2000 to December 2015. RESULTS 134 retraction notices were publish...