Abstract
A duplicate publication, or parts thereof, without disclosure, is now definitively considered to be an ethical infraction. The amount of duplication usually determines the correction that is necessary, either an erratum or a retraction. Such duplications can exist as a result of error, misconduct, or even gray areas in between. In the highly competitive market of scholarly and academic publishing, there exists constant pressure, and thus temptation, to boost output. Academics who are not native English speakers, or who publish in journals whose primary language is not English, may also consider publishing their data sets in their native language. There are increasing cases of duplicated data and papers in the English literature that have been corrected or retracted as a result of undeclared prior publication in another journal and language. This letter explores some of the discussion points surrounding duplicate publications in two languages. Provided that multiple sources in two or more languages that report the same data, text, ideas, concepts, methodologies or analyses are clearly cross-referenced, thereby alerting the editors, peers and readers that such aspects have been previously published, there is a reduced risk of an ethical infraction. In fact, secondary publications in two or more languages could benefit a wider pool of scientists. However, undeclared duplications, whole or in part, are considered to be ethical infractions.
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Notes
“Papers are submitted to the Journal with the understanding that they, or their essential substance, have been neither published nor submitted elsewhere (including news media and controlled-circulation publications). This restriction does not apply to (a) abstracts published in connection with meetings, or (b) press reports resulting from formal and public oral presentation” (pp. 676–677).
Rogers (2000a) argued, emphatically, that “Previously published in any language, previously published anywhere in the world, previously published in part or in whole, previously published in print or on electronic media, previously published regardless of whether that publication is listed in the Index Medicus, and previously published with or without the requirement for signing a transfer of copyright. Previously published means previously published, published anywhere under any condition; nothing more, nothing less” (pp. 1487).
Rogers (2000b) stated: “The fact remains that these authors signed the AJR's exclusive publication statement, in essence denying the fact that they had indeed previously published, at least, a very similar article if not the same article in another journal. It makes no difference that this was in another language, not in English, not peer reviewed, nor that no copyright agreement had been required or signed by the authors for the original publication” (pp. 1487).
https://www.elsevier.com/_data/assets/pdf_file/0012/653889/Simultaneous-Submission-factsheet-March-2019.pdf: “Submitting a paper to journals in different languages without acknowledgment of the original paper. Is it unethical? Yes” (p. 2; March, 2019); https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/publishing-ethics; https://www.elsevier.com/editors/perk/multiple-duplicate-concurrent-publication-simultaneous-submission.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/02713683.2012.645404 referring to the retraction of three papers (“The above articles duplicate previously published work and are hereby retracted in both the print and online editions of Current Eye Research. These articles appeared earlier in Chinese-language journals (referenced below). As far as can be determined, no permission was sought for the translation and re-publication of the articles. The English-language versions do not cite or refer to the prior publications, and are therefore redundant to scientific literature”).
https://www.hindawi.com/ethics/#duplicatesubmission: “Hindawi journals consider only original content, i.e. articles that have not been previously published, including in a language other than English”.
https://authorservices.wiley.com/ethics-guidelines/research-integrity.html: “the copyright transfer Agreement, exclusive License Agreement or the open Access Agreement, one of which must be submitted before publication in any Wiley journal, requires signature from the corresponding author to warrant that the article is an original work, has not been published before, and is not being considered for publication elsewhere in its final form” p. 3).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10853-019-03408-9 (“The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article [1] because it has been previously published by the same author in a Chinese-language journal [2]. Some additional text is included in the English version of the article, but most of the text and all the figures are the same as in the article that was written in Chinese. The Chinese-language publication was not cited in the duplicate publication”).
https://www.springer.com/journal/11192/submission-guidelines (“The submitted work should be original and should not have been published elsewhere in any form or language (partially or in full)”).
http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/overlapping-publications.html. Several statements are worth highlighting: “Authors should not submit the same manuscript, in the same or different languages, simultaneously to more than one journal. The rationale for this standard is the potential for disagreement when two (or more) journals claim the right to publish a manuscript that has been submitted simultaneously to more than one journal, and the possibility that two or more journals will unknowingly and unnecessarily undertake the work of peer review, edit the same manuscript, and publish the same article”; “Duplicate publication is publication of a paper that overlaps substantially with one already published, without clear, visible reference to the previous publication”; “Readers … deserve to be able to trust that what they are reading is original”; “The bases of this position are international copyright laws, ethical conduct, and cost-effective use of resources. Duplicate publication of original research is particularly problematic because it can result in inadvertent double-counting of data or inappropriate weighting of the results of a single study, which distorts the available evidence”; “Authors who attempt duplicate publication without such notification should expect at least prompt rejection of the submitted manuscript. If the editor was not aware of the violations and the article has already been published, then the article might warrant retraction with or without the author’s explanation or approval”.
https://www.jmaj.jp/instruction.php: section 9.3 “Articles that have been previously published or are being considered for publication in another journal in any language will not be accepted.”; section 9.5 “Articles that are being considered for publication in another journal including advanced publications such as “in-press” or “E-pub ahead of print” articles in any language might be regarded as redundant or duplicate publication.”; section 9.8 “All manuscripts submitted to the JMA Journal must represent the authors’ original work and not duplicate any other previously published work in any language”.
https://ascelibrary.org/doi/full/10.1061/%28ASCE%29IR.1943-4774.0001332: in this case in Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, one of the reasons for retraction was previous publication in Farsi.
https://doi.org/10.3109/02713683.2015.1024548: in this case in Current Eye Research, the reason for retraction was previous publication in German.
https://www.ehu.eus/ojs/index.php/THEORIA/about/submissions#authorGuidelines: in Theoria, an open access journal published by UPV/EHU Press, a curious statement is made regarding duplication in two languages: “We have a strict policy of avoiding duplicate publication. In particular, we do not consider for publication Spanish versions of papers already published in English”.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/russian-journals-retract-more-800-papers-after-bombshell-investigation: “In September 2019, after sifting through 4.3 million Russian-language studies, Antiplagiat found that more than 70,000 were published at least twice; a few were published as many as 17 times. Chekhovich believes most instances are due to self-plagiarism”.
https://wame.org/recommendations-on-publication-ethics-policies-for-medical-journals#Originality: “Redundant publication occurs when multiple papers, without full cross reference in the text, share the same data, or results. Republication of a paper in another language, or simultaneously in multiple journals with different audiences, may be acceptable, provided that there is full and prominent disclosure of its original source at the time of submission of the manuscript. At the time of submission, authors should disclose details of related papers they have authored, even if in a different language, similar papers in press, and any closely related papers previously published or currently under review at another journal”.
http://www.ithenticate.com/products/faqs: iThenticate® is one of the most popular similarity/plagiarism detection tools used by a large number of commercial academic publishers. Yet, the company indicates that even though it is able to check for similarities in 30 languages, those matches are in same-language comparisons only (i.e., duplications across bi- or multilingual papers is still not possible): “Which international languages does iThenticate have content for in its database? iThenticate searches for content matches in the following 30 languages: Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Thai, Korean, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmal, Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Farsi, Russian, and Turkish. Please note that iThenticate will match text between text of the same language”.
https://www.mdpi.com/2218-273X/9/3/85/htm: “the paper published in Biomolecules in 2018 was published by the same authors in 2017 in Chinese in China Tea Processing”. Of note, unretracted copies of this retracted paper continue to exist on research social media sites such as ResearcGate (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327879735) or even on the pirate site Sci-Hub (https://sci-hub.tw/10.3390/biom8040099), allowing other researchers without knowledge and who might not access the source publication from the publisher’s website to continue to cite this retracted paper (Teixeira da Silva and Bornemann-Cimenti 2017).
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages/instructions: “Manuscripts submitted to Languages should neither been published before nor be under consideration for publication in another journal”; “Republishing content that is not novel is not tolerated (for example, an English translation of a paper that is already published in another language will not be accepted)”.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03009742.2019.1655241: the retraction statement by the editors and publisher (Taylor & Francis) in the Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology does not specifically mention that the prior publication was in Chinese, which was gleaned from the authors’ statement: “The authors of the latter paper did this because they thought that publishing a paper in Chinese language would not contradict our submission to Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology in English. Clearly, this is a misunderstanding of the academic rules”.
See ICMJE definition in the link in footnote 13.
http://pleiades.online/en/authors/declaration/: As one example, Nauka Publishing House in collaboration with Pleiades Publishing Ltd./Allerton Press Inc. publish translated articles (Russian to English) of the Russian Academy of Sciences that are then published by Springer Nature. Such openly previously agreed-upon secondary publications are not redundant duplications in two languages, and do not violate the ethical guidelines of these publishers. However, any additional undeclared copies (part or whole) of these dual secondary publications would constitute a violation of such ethics codes.
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Teixeira da Silva, J.A. The ethics of publishing in two languages. Scientometrics 123, 535–541 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03363-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03363-2