Concerns about publication integrity

A blog about the trials, tribulations and outcomes of raising concerns about publication integrity

The Authors

Mark Bolland, Andrew Grey are from the Department of Medicine at the University of Auckland, and Alison Avenell from the HSRU at the University of Aberdeen.

About us

We stumbled into the issue of publication integrity by chance, but have now published more than 20 articles on the topic, and have raised concerns about publication integrity to numerous journals and publishers.

We developed the REAPPRAISED checklist to assist in the assessment of publication integrity.

We think the most important aspect (currently) of assessing publication integrity is to separate concerns about the publication from the investigation into why the errors occurred. The more important question for readers is whether the paper is valid rather than why the problems arose. The first question can be addressed promptly, while the second question might require an investigation.

See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03959-6 for a discussion on separating publication integrity concerns from misconduct concerns and for the REAPPRAISED checklist.

This blog will contain a series of ad-hoc posts about our experience of raising concerns about publication integrity.