Situation
Erika Szadocski is sent a paper for review. The paper uses a statistical method that she knows little about. Jo Ellen Picard, an advanced graduate student in the department, is currently using the method, and Szadocski asks her to evaluate the paper. Picard judges the paper poorly for having incorrectly interpreted findings the method yielded. Szadocski gives this opinion in the review without mention of her reliance on Picard regarding the methods.
Questions
- Should Szadocski have used the help of the student without consent of the editor?
- Should she have declined to referee the paper or should she have limited her review to the paper’s theory and relation to the literature, noting that she is not qualified to review the methods and the analyses?
- What are Szadocski’s responsibilities to the graduate student whose work is passed on as that of the reviewer chosen by the editor?
Discussion
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.
