I would like to ask regarding salami slicing in research.
1. When will we categorize papers as salami slicing?
2. Some published papers are part of larger research in which it employ same population, same methodology, same timeframe, but different tools (that measured different concepts) to fulfill different research objectives. This will save time, cost, and resources to achieve multiple research objectives. Is this considered as salami slicing and acceptable ethically for publication?
3. How do we handle the situation in (2) so that journal editorial will not classify it as salami slicing (or part of the research has been published elsewhere but with different research objective) and reject the submission?
Thank you.
Dear Mohd Fadhli Mohd Fauzi, we speak of "salami slicing" when results of a research project are fragmented into small portions in order to artificially increase the number of papers. In order to avoid this, every paper should have a "full story". This doesn't mean the every manuscript must be a long Full Paper. It is perfectly OK to publish particularly interesting and novel findings as Short Communications. As for point (2), it is also no problem to publish several papers resulting from a larger research project. However, every individual paper should stand alone and have its own "full story".
Dear Mohd Fadhli Mohd Fauzi, we speak of "salami slicing" when results of a research project are fragmented into small portions in order to artificially increase the number of papers. In order to avoid this, every paper should have a "full story". This doesn't mean the every manuscript must be a long Full Paper. It is perfectly OK to publish particularly interesting and novel findings as Short Communications. As for point (2), it is also no problem to publish several papers resulting from a larger research project. However, every individual paper should stand alone and have its own "full story".
Try to find some papers regarding this topic, for example:
Article Salami: By the slice or swallowed whole?
Mukherjee, A. Revisiting the Ethical Aspects in Research Publications.
[PDF] Revisiting the Ethical Aspects in Research Publications
A Mukherjee - irjms.com… several instances of misconducts in the form of fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, salami slicing and authorship … retraction and suspension of authors is leading to loss of trust among researchers. A continuous training on research ethics needs to be encouraged from the level …
Thank you Frank T. Edelmann , Anton Vrdoljak and Ingrid Del Valle García Carreño for your kind response.
In the publishing world, the salami-slicing is the quest to see how thinly a project can be sliced for multiple publications.
Dear Mohd Fadhli Mohd Fauzi apparently, the so-called "salami slicing" seems to be a severe problem in scientific publishing. It means undue fragmentation of research results that would normally be reported in one full paper. Instead, the authors write several smaller papers reporting only fragmented results of the work in order to increase the number of their publications. Please see also these interesting links about this problem:
1. Salami-slicing and plagiarism: How should we respond?
Article Salami-slicing and plagiarism: How should we respond?
2. Salami publication: Definitions and examples
Article Salami publication: Definitions and examples
In fact, the problem exists. Sometimes an article written by all the rules exceeds reasonable standards in size. In these conditions, it makes sense to divide it into two (sometimes more) parts. But this is a non-trivial work, since each of the articles must have all the features thereof, i.e. it is difficult to do without duplication (self-plagiarism?). If the first article has already been published, then you can refer to it (by the way, this will be self-citation, which is also not very good), but if the first part is still in print? On the positive side, we can mention the fact that when dividing a large article into parts, you can form separate, non-matching lists of coauthors.
But if we talk about the artificial creation of many articles from one work, then this requires a lot of effort, which is wiser to direct towards creating a new one.
Dear Vadim S. Gorshkov when you say "Sometimes an article written by all the rules exceeds reasonable standards in size." I think there are no such standards. If an article is really important and consistent, it can easily have 20 or more printed pages. This is a really long manuscript... In the earlier times (e.g. 30 years ago) it was often argued by editors that journal space is limited. However, today various high-ranked journals in your field (chemistry) publish up to 25,000 pages per year! Moreover, it is now quite common to publiah large amounts of dats as "Supplementary Information".
Dear Dr. Frank T. Edelmann
"Reasonable standards" are something that no one has seen, everyone knows about them. Nobody writes articles of 50 or 100 pages. By the way, in "Supplementary Information" these are usually measurement results and their processing, and not a part of the text.
When I first started my career, I wrote very verbose (in Tolstoyan), and my first boss did not so much add text and "wrote thoughts", but ruthlessly crossed out entire paragraphs or pages. I was very sorry (I used to pride myself on my ability to write a lot). But now I try to write "in Chekhov's way", although the first version of each article is a whole monograph (for start I put all the material in a pile, and then I try to connect it into a unified text), from which I cross out or pack paragraphs (the boss died long ago, but his work lives on).
But I understand that every 5-page article can be easily turned into 15-page one, and then "cut" into three parts ... Inspirational perspectives!
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