In scientific publishing, the Ingelfinger rule stipulates that a scientist may not publish the same original research in two different outlets.[1] It was created in 1969 by Franz J. Ingelfinger, who at the time was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), as an effort to prevent NEJM from losing originality. The rule was subsequently adopted by several other scientific journals, and shaped scientific publishing ever since.[2]
The Ingelfinger rule has been seen as having the aim of preventing authors from performing double publications which would unduly inflate their publication record.[3] On the other hand it has also been stated that the real reason for the Ingelfinger rule is to protect the journals' revenue stream, and with the increase in popularity of preprint servers such as arXiv, many journals have loosened their requirements concerning the Ingelfinger rule.[4]