Dealing with editorial misconduct
BMJ 2004; 329 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.329.7478.1301 (Published 02 December 2004) Cite this as: BMJ 2004;329:1301
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I would like to add another category of editorial responsibilities to
the list considered for a code of conduct: the relationship with reviewers
& authors.
In my experience, editors of even the most prestigious journals
exchange e-mails and phone calls with friends and other associates
regarding accepting submissions and "invited" articles and editorials.
This is within the rightful purview of their role. The problem arrives
when this network [unintentionally] serves to promote a particular group
or way of thinking in favour of a competing group or an alternate approach
to an issue. I have experienced situations where acceptance was
facilitated by a quick call or message from a supervisor to a friendly
editor, where reviewers rejected material that would have beaten their
work into press, [other reviewers should have been selected], where
reviewing was passed-on to the graduate assistant rather than done by the
professor, and where liberal courtesies have been extended to authors and
reviewers because of their positions rather than their contributions.
Academic, clinical, legal, and administrative bodies foist an
authoritative role on peer-reviewed professional journals. Much of this
is driven by the perception that the journals are “impartial”. If a
journal wishes to reject this role, then the editors should decline
loudly. If the editor and publisher wish to capitalise upon the
presumption of anonymous impartiality, then they should be honourable
about it and move beyond the “old mates network” approach to the job.
Competing interests:
always entertained reader and occasionally frustrated author
Competing interests: No competing interests
I would like to have seen a commitment to apply the same standards of rigour to press releases and media commentary that announce the published research. Don't blame hype all on the press, journals have been known to feed the frenzy by:
- Allowing generalisations to be made from narrow and specific results;
- Giving undue prominence to a single 'contrarian' result, when many others suggest the opposite;
- Allowing purely theoretical constructs to be interpreted as reality and empirically based;
- Allowing evidence-free assertions about long term promise of things like cures for cancer;
- Interpreting statistical insignificance as evidence of no effect rather than insufficient power or a demand for excessive though arbitrary confidence thresholds.
- And, I'm sure there is more...!
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
Editorial misconduct or a glitch in medical publications
The author has rightly pointed out the self regulations for the
editor and its staff. But one should not overlook the non existence of the
gold standard tools for qualifying an article as an original one and other
constraints of the editor hampering him to be on the pedistal.
Competing interests:
a toddler in the field of biomedical editing, a keen researcher and active public healh physician
Competing interests: No competing interests