ETHICS IN ACTION
Salami Slicing: What Is it and Is it Ethical? By Madeline Schwid, MD
SAEM PULSE | JULY-AUGUST 2022
Salami is a cured sausage made of fermented and dried meats that is stuffed into a log-shaped casing and cut up and served as slices. In academic writing, a salami publication refers to cutting a single study into multiple segments that are published separately. This is a pervasive problem in scientific writing. We will examine this issue further through the following case:
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You are ready to submit a manuscript for consideration to a journal about a well-received study that you just presented at a national emergency medicine meeting. One of your mentors suggests you take your basic study, break it up, and submit it to three different journals. Is this considered salami publication and is it allowed? Salami publication is when a single study is broken up into multiple publications or segments. Each piece reports on data from a single study that is split into segments known as
a “minimal publishable unit,” meaning that they are just large enough to have reasonable results and conclusions. It is considered a form of self-plagiarism in which the author’s own previously published ideas and content are used without proper attribution. This is in contrast to other forms of plagiarism in which another author’s words are used. Salami slicing is unethical for a variety of reasons, but one of the most problematic is that it misleads the scientific community and distorts medical evidence that can directly influence patients and clinical practice. For one, duplicate data can be incorporated and double counted into large scale analyses such as a metanalysis, thus influencing the overall data. Splitting data into smaller units can also make it harder to see overall trends in data and so may hinder analysis and conclusions. When these issues translate into clinical practice, patients can be harmed.
Salami slicing gives undeserved credit to authors and wastes journal resources. Academic standing, promotion, and project funding often at least partially rely on academic output and publications. This pressure to publish can be productive in some ways. It encourages people to continue to push the cutting edge of science and develop new ideas but can also encourage quantity of publications at the expense of quality. Through salami slicing, authors can artificially increase the number of publications and can receive more credit for lower value work. Given that it is very difficult to detect, the frequency of salami publication is unknown. The overall number of journal articles per health science study has increased over time. Among this increase, salami publication is likely common based on studies that have assessed for redundancy in systematic reviews and journals. Unlike more obvious forms of self-plagiarism, there is often no text redundancy in
