Salami slicers and other intellectual irregulars

摘要

Acta has had a good name throughout its 87-year history. Running the journal means a lot of work and the Editors and Reviewers do their best to ensure quality. But intellectual irregularities happen to us like other journals from time to time and it is regrettable when someone tarnishes the journals' hard-won image. This year two cases have come to our notice. In the USA, a powerful new search engine has been developed to spot verbatim publications, useful for intellectual theft (called plagiarism in English) or for the so-called practice of publishing in a 'salami' way, i.e. slicing one material into several smaller parts and publishing with virtually the same words closely related aspects of a research project, in several different journals (also called dual publication). From this search engine we were made aware earlier in the year that authors in Turkey had four years ago published an article, which is almost virtually the same as one published in Acta by authors from Israel five years before. There are slightly different figures given, but that is really all. The authors of both articles were written to. The former did not reply, which hardly was surprising, while the Israeli authors who had their intellectual work stolen, replied and seemed not to care, which also was surprising.In April of this year, a group of researchers in Austria published two articles which are almost identical to a very large degree, one on interleukin-10and one on interleukin-6, one in Acta and the other in the American Journal of Reproductive Immunology. A bit like publishing separately on twin A and twin B and letting it moreover look like they were singletons.