| Abstract: | Summary This article highlights ethical issues in publication. It addresses the provenance of ideas, problems with joint authorship, plagiarism, and the practice of duplicate submission of material for publication. Confidentiality and privacy matters, and the protection of human subjects in publication of research and clinical case studies are also discussed. The article further examines biases in literature reviews, and in the biased selection of one's best results for publication, intentional misinterpretation of data and the slanting of discussion, summary, and conclusions. Finally, the article deals with ethical problems that can arise in the publication of sponsored research, and the ethical responsibilities of editors and readers. |
