 Hello, my name is Roger Watson and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education and Practice, and that journal is published by Elsevier. In this session, I want to talk to you about unethical research practices concerned with publication, and these are things that editors hate. Now there are other issues I want to go on to, I want to talk about authorship first authorship is a tricky issue and in fact authorship issues are the issues that editors most commonly have to deal with, they are remarkably common. And if you look at the Committee on Publication Ethics annual reviews of the problems that have been brought to their attention, authorship is not always the most common issue brought to their attention, however it's completely steady over the years, something like 25% for several years of the complaints they've had to deal with have been authorship issues. So it's one of these things where other problems fluctuate and go way up and go way down, authorship issues are very steady and therefore very, very common, and I know that I've often had to deal with authorship issues. If you want to know what the appropriate standards are for authorship, I would strongly urge you to refer to Cope, the Committee on Publication Ethics, but they will refer you through to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Now it doesn't matter which field you're working in, the International Medical Journal Editors give a very good explanation of who should be an author and who shouldn't be. Now I don't have time to go into that in detail here, but it is quite clear who should and who shouldn't be. And I'll just give an example, who shouldn't be an author is someone who happens to be in charge of say a laboratory or a hospital area or something like that, who happens to be the senior person there but who had nothing to do with the actual preparation of the article or indeed with doing the research. And that's called a gift authorship or honorary authorship and we don't like it. Now we don't necessarily know that this has happened unless somebody draws it to our attention, but of course it does occasionally get drawn to our attention and we have to deal with it. On the other hand of course occasionally and probably more often what we do get referred to us is cases of where people were legitimately authors on an article and weren't included, we also have to deal with that. The other thing that we encounter increasingly is ghost authorship, where in fact someone else has written the article, but it's not obvious they're not attributed as an author. Now there are some arguments about how this should be dealt with. My feeling is that somebody who's really engaged with a manuscript, especially if they've got any subject expertise and have contributed to the development of the manuscript, not just it's writing the words, I think there may be a case for authorship, but at the very least they should be acknowledged and that can include using people who translate papers for you or translate your work for publication, at the very least they should be acknowledged. They absolutely must be acknowledged, so be aware of ghost authorship, but it's more serious in some fields, particularly in some areas of medicine where papers are written for example by drug companies and then the authorship is attributed to people who are paid to be the authors, often senior medical or even other clinicians. So that's another example of ghost authorship. Anyway that's all we want to say about authorship, please check the International Committee of Medical General Editors. Now another big area and it's really a developing area and again the International Committee of Medical General Editors and the Committee of Publication Ethics have a lot to say about this if you check their websites, then that's the area of conflicts of interest. Now I could sit here and talk about conflicts of interest alone for another another hour probably. Conflicts of interest are absolutely endless, there's no end to what can potentially be a conflict of interest, the most obvious one is financial. If you're being paid for example to test a substance or a drug and you're also carrying out the clinical trial that could be seen as a conflict of interest, but they are much wider than that. For example as an editor I have conflicts of interest, I'm an honorary professor in several universities and if people are publishing from those universities it should be declared at some point in the process that I am a visiting scholar there or I could be seen to be preferring their articles. But personal relationships, political affiliations and even religious affiliations if you're writing about certain topics can be conflicts of interest. Now what usually happens when people get into trouble about conflicts of interest is that they haven't declared them and I've had to deal with a few cases of this and when people haven't declared them the answer I've been given is I didn't want to declare them in case you wouldn't publish my paper and they've got completely the wrong end of the stick about conflicts of interest. It's not that conflicts of interest will prevent you from publishing a paper, it's that they must be declared so that anyone reading the paper can interpret the work in that light, you're not trying to hide anything. Conflicts of interest are usually things that arise after publication that cast some doubt on how independent your judgments were or indeed how independent the judgments of the editor were. So publication ethics is not just for authors, it's for editors and for publishers too, particularly in the area of conflicts of interest.