Video: 5 Unethical publication practices journal editors hate to see

Part three of the conversation between Dr. Donald Samulack, President US Operations, Editage, Cactus Communications, in conversation with Dr. Anne Woods, Chief Nursing Officer at WKH, and Shawn Kennedy, Editor in Chief, American Journal of Nursing

This vignette has some powerful takeaways for authors from the journal editors’ standpoint.

Here, Dr. Samulack, Shawn, and Dr. Woods discuss 5 unethical publication practices that journal editors need to guard themselves against: multiple submission, plagiarism, authorship issues, conflicts of interest, and duplicate publication and salami slicing. Here’s a summary of the discussion in this video:

• Authors often don’t realize that while they can query multiple journals, they should submit their paper to only one journal at a time.
• Plagiarism occurs not only when authors fail to cite the work of others but also when they refer to their own previous studies and fail to cite them.
• Journal editors also deal with two main types of authorship issues - honorary authorship and ghost authorship.
• Declaration of conflict of interest is another development area for authors to ensure that full transparency is maintained. Conflicts of interest are not always financial; they could also arise on the peer reviewers’ side.
• Duplicate publication and salami slicing are yet another practice that harm metanalyses of published scientific literature.

View other parts in the series

• Part 1: A journal editor and a publisher talk about how the publishing process really works
• Part 2: What every journal editor expects an author to do
• Part 4: Authors beware: Avoid falling prey to predatory journals and bogus conferences
• Part 5: Ethics of authorship from a journal editor's perspective