If a Reviewer Steals Your Idea: What to Do

You find your unpublished idea in someone else's paper. Before you accuse anyone, you need a timeline, a dated evidence file, and the right person to tell.

Guide · 11 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

Test the suspicion against the timeline

You find your hypothesis, design or unpublished result under someone else's name, months after your manuscript was reviewed. The thought "a reviewer stole my idea" arrives quickly. Test it first, because groups working on the same question often reach the same next step independently.

The question is not whether the work is similar. It is whether the other authors could have taken it from your manuscript, and that is mostly a question of dates.

1. Find when reviewers could first have seen your paper. Many submission systems show a status history or send an email when a manuscript goes to review. If you have neither, use the submission date as the earliest possible point.
2. Find when the other work first existed outside their lab. Look for the journal's received date if it prints one, the preprint posting date and version history, conference abstract deadlines, and registration dates for trials or systematic reviews.
3. Compare. If the other work was submitted, posted or presented before your manuscript went to review, its core did not come from your manuscript, though material added in later versions still could have. If it appeared soon after, ask whether the work could realistically have been done in the gap.
4. List every other route. Conference talks, posters, grant panels, theses, visiting researchers and former lab members all carry ideas. A leak through one of those is a different problem with a different owner.

Then look at what actually overlaps.

If most of what you have sits in the right-hand column, you probably have a case of parallel work. That is frustrating, but it is not misconduct.

What reviewers are and are not allowed to do

Your letter should describe a breach of a specific obligation, not a general sense of unfairness.

The ICMJE Recommendations treat submitted manuscripts as privileged communications and the authors' confidential property. Reviewers must not publicly discuss the work, must not appropriate authors' ideas before publication, and must not retain the manuscript for their own use. The same section warns that confidentiality may rule out uploading a manuscript to AI tools where confidentiality cannot be assured.

COPE's ethical guidelines for peer reviewers add detail that often matters in these cases. Reviewers should not use information obtained during review for their own or another's advantage. They should not involve anyone else, trainees included, without the journal's permission. They should not agree to review a manuscript very similar to one they have in preparation or under consideration elsewhere, and they should not intentionally prolong the review.

In the United States, 42 CFR Part 93, the research misconduct regulation for Public Health Service funded research, covers plagiarism "in proposing, performing, or reviewing research", including appropriating another person's ideas without appropriate credit. A finding also requires a significant departure from accepted practice, committed intentionally, knowingly or recklessly, and proven by a preponderance of the evidence. Other countries and institutions use their own definitions, so describe what happened and leave the label to investigators.

Build a dated evidence file

The COPE flowchart for this situation, Reviewer suspected to have appropriated an author's ideas or data, tells editors to gather as much documentary evidence as possible and to assess it before contacting the reviewer. Make that easy.

1. Manuscript number, submission date, and every system email or status change with its date
2. The exact version reviewers received, including supplementary files
3. The reviewer reports and decision letter you received
4. The suspect work: DOI or link, received and accepted dates, preprint versions, abstracts or slides
5. Your own dated records: ethics approval, trial or protocol registration, grant applications, notebooks, conference submissions
6. Everyone outside the journal who saw the work, and when

Keep your own copies. ICMJE says it is best practice for journals to delete rejected manuscripts from their systems unless local regulations require retention, and the COPE flowchart expects editors to ask the author for a copy if the files are gone. Preserve records exactly as they stand rather than tidying them, the same habit set out in our guide to the research integrity responsibilities of a lab lead.

Then build the comparison. A table the editor can check line by line does more work than any adjective. Two illustrative rows:

Agree the file with your co-authors before it leaves the group. If a trainee spotted the overlap, record that internally, but send the complaint yourself as senior or corresponding author.

Reporting to the editor

Write to the editor who handled your manuscript, through the journal's editorial office. That editor can see who was invited, who reviewed and who declined; you cannot. Start there even if the suspect work appeared in a different journal, because the COPE flowchart has that editor contact the other journal.

Do not name anyone as the reviewer unless the journal runs open review and told you who it was. If you believe a particular researcher is involved, say who and why in one factual sentence. The flowchart tells editors to check for links between an accused person and the actual reviewers, including people who declined the invitation.

A letter you can adapt:

Dear Dr [Editor surname],

I am writing about manuscript [ID], "[Title]", which [Journal name] sent for peer review on [date] and [rejected / is still considering].

I am concerned that confidential material from this manuscript may have been used without permission in [suspect work, with DOI or link], which was [submitted / posted / presented] on [date]. The overlap concerns [the specific elements, in one sentence]. A dated timeline and a side-by-side comparison are attached.

I do not know who reviewed the manuscript and I am not making an accusation against a named person. I would be grateful if the journal would look into this under its procedures and let me know how it intends to proceed.

My co-authors have seen and support this letter.

Sincerely, [Name], [Role], [Affiliation], [Institutional email]

Keep this separate from any appeal of the editorial decision. An appeal argues about the science; this is about conduct. Combined, the conduct concern is easier to dismiss as disappointment about a rejection.

What the journal can do

The COPE flowchart, updated in May 2025, sets out the sequence editors are expected to follow, which lets you judge whether your concern is being handled properly.

• The editor acknowledges the concern, retrieves the submission and reviews, and assesses the evidence, or asks a suitably qualified person to, before contacting the reviewer.
• If the concern does not look well founded, the editor may ask you for more evidence. Without it, you are told the case is closed.
• If it does look well founded, the editor writes to the reviewer for an explanation, may contact the reviewer's institution at the same time where plagiarism is suspected, and can refer the concern to its research integrity or compliance office.
• The journal can take the reviewer off its active reviewer list, contact other journals, conference organisers or funders who are affected, and consider reporting the case in the journal.
• Where the material has already been published elsewhere, the case may be handled as plagiarism in a published article, and any correction or retraction is for the publishing journal to decide.

Where review is anonymous, ICMJE says the reviewer's identity must not be revealed to the author without the reviewer's written permission, so expect an outcome rather than a name. Expect it to take time as well: the flowchart tells editors to keep contacting an unresponsive institution every three to six months.

Meanwhile, keep the matter confidential and answer requests promptly. Do not contact the person you suspect; the editor's first step is to assess the evidence before approaching anyone, and a message from you gets ahead of it. A polite status request to the editorial office after a reasonable interval is fine.

When the journal route stalls

Escalate in this order.

1. The publisher. ICMJE says journals should have a system for responding to appeals and complaints. If the journal does not respond, look for the publisher's publication ethics or complaints contact.
2. Institutions. Your own research integrity office can advise on process. The reviewer's institution is the body that can investigate its researcher, but it is likely to need the journal's cooperation to establish that the person had access to your confidential manuscript, which is another reason to start with the journal.
3. COPE, within its limits. According to COPE's FAQ on complaints against members, its Facilitation and Integrity subcommittee considers complaints only about COPE member journals, after you have raised the concern with the journal. It reviews the process the journal followed, not the content of your case, and it will not review matters under active follow-up by the journal or subject to ongoing legal or institutional processes. Intellectual property claims belong in legal channels. A journal citing COPE guidance is not proof of membership, so check COPE's member directory first.

If you suspect a problem during review

A reviewer asking for months of extra work is not, on its own, evidence of anything. COPE's guidelines expect reviewers to say which additional analyses are essential to support the claims, so ask the editor which requests are required.

If you have real grounds, raise them with the editor then, to the same evidence standard. If you decide to withdraw, ICMJE says authors who request withdrawal in good faith should consider the manuscript withdrawn even without confirmation.

For future submissions, many journals accept a short, reasoned request to exclude a direct competitor, and our guide to suggesting reviewers ethically covers how to word it.

A preprint changes the position. medRxiv, for example, assigns DOIs, keeps earlier versions accessible and has a policy of not removing posted preprints, so you get a public, dated record. The COPE flowchart applies only to information not already on a preprint server, so later misuse becomes a citation or plagiarism question rather than a confidentiality breach. Check the journal's preprint policy first, and note that medRxiv does not post case reports. Our explainer on preprints, accepted manuscripts and versions of record covers what you can share at each stage.

What not to do

• Do not go public while the matter is open. You may be wrong about who reviewed the paper, and COPE expects no public commentary, including on PubPeer or social media, while it reviews a complaint.
• Do not settle it through your own reviewing. If you are invited to review their work, decline and state the conflict.
• Do not stall your own paper. An investigation can take months. Resubmit elsewhere, and if a similar paper appeared after your original submission, give the new editor the dates in one sentence.
• Do not overstate. Write "may have been used" until an investigation says otherwise.

Directive Publications sets out what its reviewers agree to, including confidentiality, and how complaints about the conduct of review are handled, on its peer review page. If you have a concern about a manuscript you submitted to one of its journals, you can reach the team through the contact page.