"Salami Slicing", that is, data fragmentation, refers to the act of dividing the content that belongs to the same research result and can be published at one time into multiple papers for publication in the field of academic publishing. These separated papers are called "sausage paper".
"publish or be cursed." .
"In the atmosphere of" publish or destroy "formed in recent decades, more and more researchers regard the published records of individuals (and the whole research team) as a means to quantify their research results, which inevitably leads to the phenomenon of emphasizing quantity over quality."
"In addition, the consequence of doing so is to shift the responsibility of evaluation to the Journal. The number of publications of any particular researcher or research group has become the only criterion for measuring its scientific achievements. "
Although it is often associated with repeated publication, repeated publication refers to reporting exactly the same data in two publications. "Slicing sausage" is to divide a large study into two or more publications. They are different, but they are also an immoral means of academic publishing.
Like repeated publication, "sausage slices" will also lead to the distortion of the literature, misleading unsuspecting readers to believe that the data in each sausage paper comes from different subjects. If readers only read one of the articles, they will get incomplete information, which is likely to mislead and make wrong judgments.
For example, the examples provided by Kassirer and Angell, former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, confirm this point.
"For example, a few months ago, we received a manuscript describing the controlled intervention of a delivery center. The author sent the mother's results to us and the baby's results to another magazine. "
"These two results should be reported together. We also received a manuscript on molecular markers as a tool for cancer prognosis, and another journal received the results of a second marker from the same pathological specimen. Combining these two sets of data will obviously increase the significance of the research results. "
From this, it can be seen that decomposing a complex research containing multiple causal measures into independent small publications will have a serious negative impact on the integrity of scientific data. In some key areas of biomedical research, its incomplete conclusions may lead to deviation of policy recommendations, thus adversely affecting public health.
The motivation for researchers to publish sausage papers may be to increase the number of published articles, or to increase the exposure and citation rate of their research results. However, as the above case shows, this kind of fragmented paper reduces the quality of the article and will have a serious negative impact on the integrity of scientific data and scientific rigor.
At the same time, it is also an abuse of journal editors and peer review experts. In addition, there is the possibility of copyright infringement. This is because data or text (or two elements) that appear in one copyrighted publication will also appear in another publication, and the copyrights of these publications are owned by different entity publishers.