Redundant Publications: duplicate
and overlapping publications, salami
slicing
Module II Unit 4
Duplicate and Overlapping Publications
• Duplicate publication, multiple publication,
or redundant publication refers to publishing
the same intellectual material more than
once, by the author or publisher
• It does not refer to the unauthorized
republication by someone else, which
constitutes plagiarism, copyright violation, or
both.
Duplicate and Overlapping Publications
• Multiple submission is not plagiarism, but it is
today often viewed as academic misbehavior
because it can skew meta-analyses and review
articles and can distort citation
indexes and citation impact.
• It was not always looked upon as harshly, as it
began centuries ago and, besides the negative
motive of vanity which has always been possible, it
also had a legitimate motive in reaching
readerships of various journals and books.
Duplicate and Overlapping Publications
• A formalization of the policy of disallowing duplicate
publications was given by Franz J. Ingelfinger, the
editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, in
1969.
• He coined the Ingelfinger rule term banning
republications in the journal. Most journals follow
this policy today.
• The BMJ, for example, requires copies of any
previous work with more than 10% overlap of a
submission to be submitted before approving a work
for publication.
Ingelfinger Rule
• In scientific publishing, the 1969 Ingelfinger rule originally
stipulated that The New England Journal of
Medicine (NEJM) would not publish findings that had
been published elsewhere, in other media or in other
journals.
• The rule was subsequently adopted by several other
scientific journals, and has shaped scientific publishing
ever since.
• Historically it has also helped to ensure that the journal's
content is fresh and does not duplicate content previously
reported elsewhere, and seeks to protect the scientific
embargo system
Disadvantages of Duplicate Publication
• Wastes time of peer-reviewers and editors
• Wastes resources and journal pages
• Distorts academic reward system
• Infringes on copyright
• Inflates scientific literature for no benefit
other than that of the author
Points to remember
• Journals sometimes choose to republish seminal articles,
whether from their own past volumes, from other
journals, or both.
• Re-publication serves the goal of bringing important
information to new readerships, which makes it
analogous to some instances of duplicate publication on
that score.
• However, it is different from duplicate publication in the
respect that there is no element of merely gaming the
system of citation impact.
• Republished articles are clearly labeled as such, allowing
them to be recognized as such in citation analysis.
Self-Plagiarism
• When authors re-use their previously written
work or data in ‘new’ written material without
letting the reader know that the material had
appeared earlier.
– Republishing the same material
– Reusing portions of a previously published paper
– Publishing a significant study as smaller studies to
increase the number of publications