Table 2 Issues of scientific integrity, encountered with submitted manuscriptsa

From: The publishing game: reflections of an editorial team

Plagiarism: two instances; in one a reviewer found that he

 himself had been plagiarized.

Copyright violation due to duplicate figure publication:

 Laboratory Investigation was just barely the first to publish the figure.

Data falsification: a submitted figure from a previously

 published paper had been resized, rotated 90°, and labeled differently within the figure.

Questionable care of animals: several papers contained studies

 involving questionable care and use of animals, and were not considered further.

Conflict of Interest: there were some instances of reviewers

 who did not reveal conflict of interest that could be construed to have either positive or negative bias, such as recent collaboration with the authors, or previous negative review of the submitted manuscript.

  1. aTotal instances of questionable integrity were about 10, out of over 2500 manuscripts reviewed over 5 years (∼0.4%).
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