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 by the JA [1] and a case report published by the Journal of Clinical Anesthesia (JCA) [2] should be regarded as duplicate publications as these articles share very similar content. I reported this matter to the EiC of the JCA and asked for an explanation from Dr. Kawano, the primary author of these articles.

Dr. Kawano’s reply is as follows: this letter [1] was written based on the data from experiments conducted independently. However, these experiments were partly intended to be conducted as additional experiments correlating our earlier submitted case report [2]. The earlier report had been accepted by the JCA but not yet published when we submitted this letter to the JA.

I, the Section Editor in charge, and another Section Editor on the JA Editorial Board, carefully reread these papers and have reached the conclusion that it is unnecessary to regard these papers as duplicate publications that require retraction. The EiC of the JCA also has given us the same opinion. The JCA article [1] contains, in addition to a case report, in vitro data on the interactions of rocuronium and sugammadex, whereas the JA letter [2] contains data on rocuronium, vecuronium, and succinylcholine as well. In addition, the figures concerning rocuronium/sugammadex presented in these two articles are not the same, and the dose ranges of sugammadex are also different.

Nevertheless, both the JA and the JCA consider it ethically inappropriate that the authors neither referred to the JCA article [2] in the JA paper [1] nor stated in a cover letter to the JA that a part of the results accepted for publication by the JCA are described in the draft submitted to the JA. The author apologizes for these omissions.

On behalf of the JA Editorial Board, I ask all authors that, when a draft being submitted may contain any part of content already published or accepted for publication, they should explicitly describe this fact in a cover letter and should cite the relevant published article in the new draft.