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Does submitting two (substantially different) versions of a same paper count as dual submission? To be specific, let me take this as an example:

Say I've done a research and a paper A was written about the research. However, later I found that I can make some improvements on the method of A, and after making these improvements I've got B, a second version of A. A and B are same in their abstracts, introductions and related works, but largely different in their methods and experiments. I've submitted B to conference X which will inform its final decision to authors in late June and I'm going to submit A to another conference Y whose submission deadline is in late April.

Question is, will this be considered as a dual submission? If the answer is positive, then which part(s) of the content of A should I modify to avoid such a problem? Thanks.

Note that my field is Computer Science, and most conferences in this field consider their proceedings as publications.

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    If you think of these as "two different versions of the same paper", then likely so will the program committee(s), so they will likely consider it double submission (and immediately reject both versions). In any case, now that you have the stronger result, why would you want to publish the weaker one?
    – JeffE
    Apr 11, 2020 at 4:59
  • @JeffE Because the methods proposed by paper A and B are quite different, although the motivation of A and B is the same. A and B also solve the same problem. I don't know how to clearly describe such a relationship between A and B, perhaps "same" is not a proper one.
    – SnowyJune
    Apr 11, 2020 at 7:23
  • @JeffE although the results of A is weaker than B, the method of A does have some advantages compared to previous proposed methods. On the other hand, the acceptance rate of conference Y is greater than that of conference X by ~20%, and now I desperately need a published paper for some important reasons. So that's why I decided to submit B to X and A to Y
    – SnowyJune
    Apr 11, 2020 at 7:28
  • If B improves over A, wouldn't your abstract/motivation/related work mention what A does and how B improves over it?
    – GoodDeeds
    Apr 11, 2020 at 17:41
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    That last comment convinces me that you're trying to cheat the system. Even if you do submit both papers (or both versions of the paper), each submission must cite the other, because you know that they exist.
    – JeffE
    Apr 13, 2020 at 14:11

2 Answers 2

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It is up to the editor/conference committee/reviewers to decide if two papers have too much overlap. Show them about both versions of the paper, and let them decide.

Since there is no objective way to decide if two papers are adequately different, the criterion is the opinion of the editor.

If the editor is unaware of the situation, then you are at risk of committing misconduct. If the editor knows and approves, you are likely to be behaving appropriately.

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  • Thanks. Could you further explain what's the most common criterion? For example, if I re-write the title, the abstract, the related works and the introduction of paper A, how probable is the two papers considered overlapped?
    – SnowyJune
    Apr 11, 2020 at 7:36
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    "Could you further explain what's the most common criterion?" No, there is no such thing.
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Apr 11, 2020 at 8:54
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    I think you mean both editors (or in this case, both program committees), not just one.
    – JeffE
    Apr 13, 2020 at 14:12
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Instead of calling your papers A and B, you can call them

  1. Some paper in computer science, I
  2. Some paper in computer science, II

Change both abstracts restricting to the content of that particular paper. You can also mention in both that there are two pats for this.

This practice is usually followed when the length of the paper exceeds certain limit.

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    I agree especially with "Change both abstracts." You've described (particularly in the comments) differences that seem (to me) significant, and I think the abstracts should reflect that.
    – Andreas Blass
    Apr 11, 2020 at 14:39
  • @AndreasBlass Thanks for your supporting comment...
    – Praphulla Koushik
    Apr 11, 2020 at 14:53

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