Duplicate publication
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.
Multiple submission is not plagiarism, but it is considered a serious academic misbehavior. Even when a publication fee is paid, it nonetheless wastes the most important resource in academic publishing: the time and work of the referees and the editors, and contributes to the problem it is intended to solve, the slow speed of editorial review. And there is the unfortunate possibility that more than one journal will accept it. As there is no time for feedback from readers, the same errors appear in various journals.
Multiple publication of the same research can also skew meta-analyses and surveys.[1]
As a research-paper is an implicit claim of furthering knowledge, the researcher must state what exactly is the claim of novelty. This would let the editor rate the article in view of their policy. For example, all/most would reject a paper if already published in another journal, although may tolerate (as IEEE does) a re-edited [and expanded] conference paper.
While the rule has always been present it was formalized by Franz J. Ingelfinger editor of the The New England Journal of Medicine who coined the Ingelfinger rule banning republications in his journal. It is today policy at most journals. The BMJ requires copies of any previous work with more than 10% overlap of a submission before approving a work for publication.[2]
With the advancement of the internet, there are now several tools available to aid in the detection of plagiarism and multiple publications within biomedical literature. One tool developed in 2006 by researchers in Dr. Harold Garner's laboratory at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas is Déjà Vu, an open-access database containing several thousand instances of duplicate publication.
See also
- Ingelfinger rule
- Self-plagiarism