Special issue on overweight and obesity
The number of papers in the area of overweight and obesity submitted to our journal has increased immensely over the last few years. For this reason, we have chosen to devote this January 2011 issue solely to papers on this topic. The enclosed papers cover several areas such as monitoring and assessment(Reference Pedrosa, Correia and Seabra1–Reference Beydoun, Fanelli Kuczmarski and Wang9), determinants(Reference Duncan, Duncan and Schofield10–Reference El Rhazi, Nejjari and Zidouh18), intervention(Reference Collins, Morgan and Warren19) and policy(Reference Thow, Heywood and Leeder20), and originate from studies undertaken all over the world. We could point to the lack of intervention and policy papers as well as capacity building papers; they are still rare pieces for our journal and we certainly would like to see more of them.
We hope that this collection of papers will be of use for many of our readers. It provides a quick overview of ongoing research in the area of obesity, reflecting the important part of public health nutrition that it constitutes.
Carlos Monteiro receives award and writes about ultra-processed food
Another brilliant way of celebrating the new year with Public Health Nutrition is to highlight that our highly esteemed Associate Editor Professor Carlos Monteiro, from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, recently received an award from the Pan American Health and Education Foundation and the Pan American Health Organization. Carlos, you have our deepest appreciation: congratulations on the award and thank you for all the work you are doing for the journal!
In this issue we are also including a paper on ultra-processed food(Reference Monteiro, Bertazzi Levy and Moreira Claro21) co-written by Carlos. It is included in a series of papers, one of which was published in November 2010 in World Nutrition (www.wphna.org), and makes very interesting reading.
Adding authors to an already published paper
We have previously written about authorship and the problems related to this delicate issue in academic publishing. Over the years we have seen eminence authorships, gift authorships, ghost authorships and many more apart from those who are true authors according to the Vancouver rules. Information on authorship ethics can be found on the website of the Committee for Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/) – where, among other important subjects, hands-on guidance regarding authorship disputes can be found by following the ‘Guidelines’ link.
We received a letter some time ago about a paper published previously in Public Health Nutrition with a request to add authors to this paper. The editorial board has been discussing how to deal with this issue, and we have now decided that we can let this pass as an corrigendum. You can find the corrigendum at the end of this issue. This corrigendum touches upon the issue of ghost authorships, where you have authors who have helped with the paper but are not included as authors. In this case, it seems to have been an oversight from those who submitted the paper. In other cases, data are handed over to someone who ‘writes them up’. The latter problem is extremely difficult to deal with, both for those who lost ‘their data’ perhaps due to a supervisor's decision and for those who actually write and publish on data that rightfully should have been published by someone else. Authorship is one of the most difficult issues in academia, and should be handled properly.
The board of editors wish you an interesting, fruitful and successful publishing year in 2011!
