Editorial

First, the good news. As you may have seen on the front cover, Human Fertility is now included in Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index and we expect to receive our first impact factor next year; a timely recognition of the high standing of the Journal. I will write more about this when the impact factor is announced.

Unfortunately, the remainder of this editorial is concerned with the issue of plagiarism. The Journal has experienced three cases of plagiarism in its history; at least, three of which we have been aware of.

The first was in 2007 when two articles had to be retracted from publication due to their having been published previously in other journals. The Statement of Retraction can be found in Human Fertility (2007).

The second case occurred last year. We received 17 papers for submission, all from the same author (some with co-authors), and began the review process when sharp-eyed referee, Janine Elson, spotted that one of the papers seemed familiar to her. A web search soon revealed this to be the case; the paper had already been published in another journal. The plot thickened as more of the papers from the author(s) were revealed as almost direct copies of papers by others published elsewhere. In each case, the original papers had been re-formatted for Human Fertility, the Authors’ names and contact details changed and in many cases, the data altered slightly. When confronted with this, the author(s) did not deny what had happened but claimed that his group had been repeating/validating studies in his institution that had already been carried out and published elsewhere. However, much to our astonishment, he then submitted a further 3 manuscripts to Human Fertility which again were virtually word for word copies of papers from other authors already in the literature. Fortunately, none of the 20 papers we received appeared in Human Fertility; one was ‘In press’ but it was immediately withdrawn. Other journals were less fortunate and one of the papers we received, which had already been published twice, was the subject of a retraction and editorial in Human Reproduction (Van Steirteghem and Williams, 2011). If it had been published in Human Fertility, it would have appeared 3 times, in different journals.

The activities of this author, were, of course, totally unacceptable and breached ethical codes of publishing; ‘Human Fertility considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that they have been submitted only to – a given journal–, that, have not been published already, nor are – under consideration for publication or in press else where’ (Statement of Retraction Human Fertility 2007).

The one redeeming feature, if it can be called that, of this episode was that it served to highlight the robust standards of acceptance for Human Fertility in that of the 20 papers submitted which had already been published in well-known journals, we rejected 11 of them outright (I admit that the Referees may have felt some of the results were a bit dated!). The remaining 8 manuscripts were withdrawn before completing the review process.

The last incident of plagiarism occurred this year. By now, Sandra Downing, our Editorial Assistant was putting large parts of each manuscript received into Google and realized that about 80% of one submitted paper was taken directly from two articles which had already appeared in another journal. There were two authors on the papers submitted to Human Fertility and their accounts of the plagiarism (which they admitted) differed slightly; there had obviously been insufficient communication between the authors, and some misunderstanding. In view of this, we agreed to bar them from submitting manuscripts to Human Fertility for 5 years. In the other two cases of plagiarism, the ban on accepting manuscripts from the authors was for life.

In each of the three cases, the authors’ institution(s) were notified and our Publishers, Informa Healthcare, have backed us strongly throughout, in terms of the processes adopted and the action taken. I am indebted to them and above all, to our Sub-editors and Editorial Board who have provided me with sound advice and unwavering support.