Manuscript reviews are highly confidential and involve proprietary rights, and reviewers have an obligation to decline a review request if they believe they may be biased or unqualified. Clearly Erika, after having read the manuscript, realized that she was not in a position to evaluate the methodological merits of the work. At this point, she really had two options: (1) contact the editor of the journal and indicate that she is not qualified to evaluate this manuscript and therefore will have to decline and perhaps suggest Jo Ellen as a reviewer; or (2) evaluate the parts of the manuscript that she is qualified to evaluate and be frank in the review about her inability to comment on the methodology of the project.

Due to issues of confidentiality, the manuscript should absolutely not have been passed for review to Jo Ellen without the prior approval of the journal editor. Jo Ellen should have recognized her input into this process as unethical as well.

In addition to violating confidentiality guidelines, Erika also submitted and took credit for an article review that was not her work. Her failure to be honest with the editor violated a number of different ethical standards, and may indeed result in her being asked in the future to review a methodologically sophisticated manuscript that she is once again unqualified to evaluate.