ADDRESSING POTENTIAL DUPLICATE PUBLICATION: EDITORIAL CHALLENGE AND RESOLUTION
A case emerged where a paper was accepted and published in Journal A, focusing on a cohort of patients with a distinctive respiratory pathogen. However, a similar paper had been previously published in US Journal B a few months earlier, involving essentially the same set of patients (with a minor addition) and presenting additional secondary outcome data with identical conclusions.
The editor of Journal A raised concerns about duplicate publication, considering the similarities between the two papers. The authors contested this, asserting that the inclusion of supplementary data justified the separate publication.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was consulted for guidance on this challenging issue. COPE emphasized the importance of journals having clear instructions for authors regarding duplicate publication, and some suggested requiring authors to submit related papers during the submission process. The Forum acknowledged the complexity of the situation and proposed a rule of thumb: if the "extra" data cannot stand alone, it likely constitutes duplicate publication.
The consensus was that editors should exercise judgment in such cases, and if duplicate publication is suspected, a correction should be published in both journals. The use of software that quantifies the overlap between two papers in terms of percentages was suggested to aid editorial decision-making.
In this specific case, the editor communicated to the authors that the situation was deemed duplicate publication, leading to the withdrawal of the paper from the journal's website. A notice of duplicate publication was subsequently published in the editor's journal to inform readers and address transparency.
This case underscores the importance of clear guidelines for authors, the role of editorial judgment, and the potential consequences of duplicate publication, especially in the context of meta-analyses where data duplication can distort research findings.
