IS IT EARLY TO TALK ABOUT UNETHICAL PUBLICATION PRACTICES?

Abstract

As modern medical and health sciences education in Ethiopia has not more than half a century publication in the field was limited. However, in recent years due to relative increment in health workforce and number of journals to publish on, the number of publications both on international and local journals are increasing alarmingly. In line with this, unethical publication practices- authorship problems, duplicate publications, salami publications, snatching others’ work,plagiarism, scientific fraud and publication with no new information are becoming concerns.In the past few years we witnessed some of the above unethical publication practices committed not only on our journals but also on international journals by our academicians. It is not too early though not late to raise the issue so that researchers can abide to the international ethical standards.Since the problem is global in nature, it is not easy to investigate and tackle. Taking preventive measures at every level of publication process is crucial. Authors, journal editors and peer reviewersshould stand on the frontline to craft ethical publication practices in the country. Readers as well have responsibility of exposing unethical publication practices whenever they come across with.In the 2 nd World Conference on Research Integrity in Singapore in 2010, international standards for responsible research publication for editors and authors were developed with the help of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). As the statements are posted on COPE website, http://publicationethics.org/resources/international-standards, I request all the Ethiopian Journal of Health Science attendants to read the documents to cultivate good publication practices. The current issue of EJHS contains eightdiverse original articles including one article on eye care,one on surgical infection, one on quality of laboratory tests, one on sanitary condition of food establishments, one on HIV/AIDS, one on teen age pregnancy, one on child abuse and another one on medical education; and a book review and one brief communication. The study on conducted on 402 cataract patients revealed that 36% had cataract with pseudoexfoliation; 67% with bilateral involvement. The prevalence of PEX was higher in the age group of 70 years and above. A study done on 294 patients who had surgery showed an 11% confirmed bacterial nosocomial infection. The same study revealed thatnearly 100% of gram positiveand 95.5% of gram negative isolates were resistant against two or more antimicrobial drugs. A study done on quality of some laboratory tests exposed that only for 65% values were reported and about 65% of them fell outside of the allowable limits of errors for the chemistry tests of the control specimen used. The study assessed the sanitary condition of food establishments uncovered that66% had flush toilets and only 34% had a proper solid waste collection receptacle. A study conducted on 3788 blood donors at Jimma to determine magnitude of sero-positivity to HIV showed a prevalence of 1% with higher proportion on males. On a study done in Nigeria, over 6% of the 1341 deliveries were teenagers. A study done on medical students revealed that majority of the students ’ fear and nausea have decreased while their interest and excitement has increased on subsequent exposure to dissection. A study assessed child sexual abuse in Addis Ababa reported 23% of all crimes in children were child sexual victimization where, about 21 children every month were reported to be sexually abused.