Announcement from the Editors-in-Chief Regarding Duplicate Submission

The Editorial Staff of JMA Journal recently received a manuscript that had extremely high percentage of similarity, almost identical, with a paper previously published in another journal. This was an obvious case of duplicate submission. We immediately rejected the paper and wrote to the authors stating a deadline for response. However, we did not receive any response. Therefore, we decided to penalize the authors for such a breach of publication ethics as follows.

• Future submissions from the authors to the JMA Journal will be prohibited for the next 5 years.
• The fact will be informed to the Japanese Association of Medical Sciences, the journal in which the original paper was published, and the institution of the authors.

We sincerely hope and trust that there will be no repetition of this kind in the future.

Yutaka Atomi, MD, PhD and Tsuguya Fukui, MD, MPH, PhD
JMA Journal Editors-in-Chief
(Released online August 19, 2019)