The case
One of the journal's reviewers drew attention to a potential case of plagiarism. The reviewer believes that the manuscript submitted to the journal, which presents a retrospective study of a group of patients with a particular disease, plagiarises an article published in another journal. The authors are from an institute in a Middle Eastern country.

The submitted article contains numerous full paragraphs identical to those in the previous article. The editors also suspect that there may be fraud. For example, the submitted paper reports data on 28 patients (72% male and 28% female); 68% had clinical sign 1; 26% had sign 2; 9% had sign 3; and one was asymptomatic. The specific study was diagnostic in 45%. In the first study, 47 infants were examined. The percentages of the parameters above were identical!

COPE advice.
This is outright plagiarism, but there is also likely to have been fraud given the same percentages in different subgroups of reported cases. The question arises whether the study was actually conducted.

All authors should be asked to explain why the text was identical to that of another article and why the percentages were identical. No accusations should be made and no deadline should be set for a response. If there is no satisfactory response, COPE recommends that the matter be reported to the Vice-Chancellor for Research at the authors' university, with a request to investigate. COPE also suggested that the matter be referred to the Ministry of Health. If the university does not respond appropriately, they should be politely reminded every 3 months, requesting the results of their investigation.

If an editor decides to publish an editorial about plagiarism/cheating, etc., they should not identify the article or authors until the relevant authorities have reached a conclusion.

Source: https://entc.com.ua/uk/1972-mozhlyvyi-vypadok-plahiatu