I found that unrelated researchers used a pair of primers (designed for qPCR) from our publication in their study (already published) without giving us any credit (citing us). Since the target sequence is 11 kb long, I assume that a pure coincidence in designing identical primers is really low.
Would you consider it an ethical problem and if so what would be the procedure to tackle it? (Contact authors first/contact the journal first?)
Since primer design programs work on reproducible algorithms and the target dna is probably appropriate for the next stage of experimentation (cloning perhaps) it would be very difficult to prove that they were aware of your primers and both sequence and primers are in the public domain so I do not think that ethics can be proved to have been breached in this instance
I will agree with @Paul Rutland. I will be very difficult. I will suggest contacting authors for friendly interaction and discussion of it and perhaps offer to collaborate in future works.
if the primer design software also generates the same primers, I do not think it is an ethics issue.
Paul Rutland and Alain Mwamba Mukendi Thank you, for your opinion on the issue. I kind of anticipated that answer. The reason why I assume they used our primers is that we are not usually happy with what the primer design software designs for us and we rather hand-design our primers for a real-time PCR assay, which was also this case. What we are dealing with is the viral genome sequence and it has some specifics. When I tried to feed the design software with the genome sequence or the specific part of it, it did not retrieve our results. But you are right that this option can never be excluded for 100% and it would be very hard to prove. We will still consider contacting the authors to let them know, we are aware of what might have happened and probably discourage them in the future.
While it is frustrating and poor scientific practice this kind of thing does happen in science as in all other aspects of life. You may want to consider some aspects of the situation. Your group and theirs clearly are doing similar work so if you are close geographically your college may use scientists from their college as external referees for higher degrees and may even be in a position to employ each others staff when grant money is hard to come by. Also bad feeling between groups can last for many years and who knows which people will be in a position of influence in journals/grant giving bodies in the future.. This advice clearly is not out of the top drawer ethically but is offered pragmatically for your consideration. Best wishes for your decision Hana Tykalová
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