Dear JA Readers,I, the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the Journal of Anesthesia(JA), have received a letter from a reader of the Journal,pointing out that a letter to the editor recently published bythe JA [1] and a case report published by the Journal ofClinical Anesthesia (JCA) [2] should be regarded asduplicate publications as these articles share very similarcontent. I reported this matter to the EiC of the JCA andasked for an explanation from Dr. Kawano, the primaryauthor of these articles.Dr. Kawano’s reply is as follows: this letter [1] waswritten based on the data from experiments conductedindependently. However, these experiments were partlyintended to be conducted as additional experiments corre-lating our earlier submitted case report [2]. The earlierreport had been accepted by the JCA but not yet publishedwhen we submitted this letter to the JA.I, the Section Editor in charge, and another SectionEditor on the JA Editorial Board, carefully reread thesepapers and have reached the conclusion that it is unnec-essary to regard these papers as duplicate publications thatrequire retraction. The EiC of the JCA also has given us thesame opinion. The JCA article [1] contains, in addition to acase report, in vitro data on the interactions of rocuroniumand sugammadex, whereas the JA letter [2] contains dataon rocuronium, vecuronium, and succinylcholine as well.In addition, the figures concerning rocuronium/sugamma-dex presented in these two articles are not the same, and thedose ranges of sugammadex are also different.Nevertheless, both the JA and the JCA consider it eth-ically inappropriate that the authors neither referred to theJCA article [2] in the JA paper [1] nor stated in a coverletter to the JA that a part of the results accepted forpublication by the JCA are described in the draft submittedto the JA. The author apologizes for these omissions.On behalf of the JA Editorial Board, I ask all authorsthat, when a draft being submitted may contain any part ofcontent already published or accepted for publication, theyshould explicitly describe this fact in a cover letter andshould cite the relevant published article in the new draft.References
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Sep 7, 2018
Nasim Tabrizi 
Open Access
