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Dr Shock MD PhD
Publish or Perish sums up the urgency for scientists to publish in top journals. Scientists work in competitive environments in which publishing is essential to their careers, reputation and research funding. Journal editors and peer reviewers are the ones to judge the manuscripts for quality and safeguard the interests of the readership of the journal.
The editors have different tasks to preform in order to prevent conflict of interests and ensuring the readers of read worthy publications. The first one being the prevention of duplicate publications. This is also called the “Ingelfinger rule”. But what constitutes duplication?
Duplicate publication can take a number of forms, ranging from splitting data into the “minimal publishable unit” (MPU) described by Bill Parmley, to publishing in symposia or proceedings as well as in journals, to submitting virtually the same data to two or more journals in the same language. The issue is receiving heightened attention recently due to the dissemination of new research findings in virtually complete form on the internet and in non-subscription medical periodicals shortly following oral presentations.
If one of the people in the audience publishes a post on his blog with the results and probably a video of the event, can this be called a duplication? Should editors not only use PubMed or Medline to exclude duplication of manuscripts but also Google? Editors of the Annals of Neurology also use Google Scholar to screen for prior use of key phrases or paragraphs in a submission under review.
Another important task is the peer review. The use of peers to evaluate the work of fellow scientists is assumed to raise the quality of the submitted manuscript. There has been some research to the effect of peer review but from a systematic …
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