EDITORIALS Editorials represent the opinions of the authors and THE JOURNAL and not those of the American Medical Association. Duplicate Publication, Multiple Problems

IN THIS ISSUE OF JAMA, WE ARE PUBLISHING A LETTER OFapology fromStaats for duplicate publication of data froma randomized controlled trial of ziconotide for treat-ment of pain in patients with cancer or AIDS.1 Staats is the first author of the report of this trial, which was pub-lished in JAMA in January 2004.2 However, most of the data from this study had been reported 4 years earlier byMathur in a review article in another journal.3 Determining which article is original andwhich is duplicate is not a simple task. If duplication is determined by which report was pub-lished first, the article by Mathur3 is clearly the first publi-cation of the data from this trial. But is it really the original report of this trial? The issue is whether to define original-ity by publication date vs the authorized complete report from those responsible for the conduct of the study and the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data. By my reasoning, the article by Staats et al is a duplicate publica-tion of the trial data, but it is the original full report of th