Editorial - Duplicate and salami publications

Extent of the problem Though there is a high degree of trust and veracity in medical publications, an occasional report of duplicate and salami publications bothers the medical fraternity. In recent years, there have been more than 100 cases of notices of duplicate or redundant publications in various journals. Byron Bailey, Editor, Archives of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, found that of 1000 authors chosen at random from his journal, 201 published 644 articles which could be labelled as dupli 1. During their work on impact of duplicate publicaon meta-analysis, Tramer et al found that 17% of the manuscripts were covertly duplicated.2 Similarly, dura meta-analysis on exogenous surfactant, Raju found 6 of 35 articles to contain overlapping data3