Irresponsible authorship and wasteful publication

Fraud is a dramatic offense in scientific publishing but other offenses are more frequent and probably far more damaging. The most frequent lesser offenses are irresponsible authorship and wasteful publication. The authorship problems include listing "authors " who made little or no contribution to the work reported and omitting of persons who made major contributions. Wasteful publication includes dividing the results in a single study into two or more papers ("salami science"); republishing the same material in successive papers (which need not have identical format and content); and blending data from one study with additional data to extract yet another paper that could not make its way on the second set of data alone ("meat extenders"). Wasteful publication may be the most frequent of these offenses and is probably the most damaging because of its economic implications for publishers, readers, libraries, and indexes. F R A U D in scientific publication is a dramatic abuse and it readily catches the eye of the popular press and the pub-lic. But there are abuses that because of their frequency and ubiquity should concern us more than the extreme of fraud. These are abuses of two kinds: irresponsible au-thorship and wasteful publication. Public evidence of these abuses is scanty and largely anecdotal, although they have been discussed in the liter-ature (1, 2). Aside from May's study (3) of duplicate papers in one small corner of mathematics, however, I do not know of any thorough and quantitative studies of the extent and frequency of these problems