Is it ethical to split the research contribution to increase the paper count?

Question

My university has a rule that all students need to publish at-least a couple of papers in SCI rated journals.

A senior told me that it is better not to publish the research contribution in a single paper. The length of paper is not an issue here. The act is meant for increase in paper count and hence becoming eligible to receive the degree.

Assume that the research contribution is on a task T. If I manage to get a couple of methods that perform better than the existing methods. One is accuracy A and another one with accuracy A' where A' > A.

The senior asks to send the algorithm related to A to an SCI journal and submitting method related to A' after enough amount of time on a pre-print site so that it can be sent to another or the same SCI journal for acceptance.

I believe that it does not fall under the category of unfair means. No one can object if I decide to do so. But, I have doubt on whether the act is ethical or unethical to do?

Answer 1

What you’re describing is basically salami publication. When done with the goal of artificially inflating your publication count and at the cost of reducing the effectiveness of the communication of your ideas and results, I think there is a strong case to be made that it’s (at least mildly) unethical. However, as discussed on the linked Wikipedia page, people who wish to rationalize such behavior have a few reasonably valid arguments they can use to deflect criticism of unethical behavior. So, while it’s certainly not the best practice, it’s also not the worst. Perhaps more than being unethical, it is a shoddy practice used by mediocre people with mediocre ambitions, and will not help a person get a good reputation.

With that being said, if your institution is setting up graduation requirements that strongly incentivize its PhD students to engage in unethical behavior, it really has only itself to blame when they end up engaging in such behavior. In that case, there is also a strong case to be made that it is the institution that is behaving unethically, and that carries a large share of the blame for any unethical practices of its students and faculty.

Answer 2

The use of publication metrics for assessment is unethical. This approach of "salami slicing" publications to game those metrics is an entirely reasonable response to the unethical situation you and your supervisor find yourselves in.

Perhaps, further on in your career, you can fight back against the system you find yourself in and improve it for those that come after you but - for now - you should concentrate on getting your degree and follow your supervisor's advice.

Answer 3

This is known as ''salami slicing''. It's not exactly unethical, but it's definitely discouraged.

It's most helpful for other researchers if you collect the relevant and similar results in one place where they can be conveniently accessed. Salami slicing is the opposite of this because you are taking similar, connected results and then dispersing them out and spreading them all out into separate publications in different journals (all of which need to be paid for in theory). This is clearly unhelpful and not good practice for a researcher working in a community of other researchers. Reputation is important in academia, and it will not help your reputation if it is blatant that you are engaging in this practice in order to inflate the quantity of your publications.

In general, this is an important thing to emphasise: quantity is nice, but quality of the publications is the primary thing and this is what your reputation will primarily rest on. If students are being encouraged to reduce the quality of their publications by splitting them into lots of smaller papers, then this is just bad practice.

Answer 4

Cynical response here - but do you want to graduate? Do you need these papers to graduate?

Does each piece of work stand on its own? Will it get published in great journals broken apart? If so - they do what you need to do to graduate, and to meet those KPIs that might be stupid but still affect employment/income/graduation.

Sure it might be nice to keep them all together, it probably would make for a stronger paper - but if it means you cannot graduate then you've gained the warm fuzzy feeling of not breaking up your work, and that far worse feeling of failing out of your degree. If it means delaying completion - what will that cost you (tuition fees, funding lost, job opportunities)?

As for ethics - it really is shades of grey. There's absolutely a balance between degrading the quality of publications and meeting KPIs. But if the papers stand on their own, and meet the scientific standards for the field, then do what you need to do. If, however, this means that you have two substandard publications, or that you need to target low-quality journals, then it's not unethical but often counter-productive career wise.

If your second piece of work shows your earlier work to be wrong, and you know this, then yes it would be unethical to publish the earlier piece.

Answer 5

I don't think this is merely salami slicing, but something less ethical.

Salami slicing, in my understanding, is when you have two related results which you choose to publish separately rather than in a combined paper. In that case, it is a trade-off between having two weaker papers or one stronger one, and I don't see that there is anything particularly wrong with either option, particularly when it is the natural response to some external pressure.

However, here you appear to only have one result (that you can improve the accuracy to that of A'), and to want to get a weaker version of the same result accepted before you tell anyone what your real result is. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but the fact that you talk about delaying submitting the second paper suggests that the existence of A', if disclosed, would prevent your results on A from getting published. In that case I think you would be misleading the journal by not disclosing this.

Answer 6

If you send paper A to a journal and A' to a preprint server, there is a clear chance that the reviewers look at the preprint A' while reviewing A. How does it look then?

Irrespective of your institutional guidelines, its always better to put your best foot forward, while submitting a paper to a Journal. Withholding can only backfire.

Edit after comment by Wrzlprmft

Thank you. Well, then my answer makes a "U" turn. If the institute measures the quantum of work by the number of papers, and if you feel that the research is good enough to be split into two and still both be acceptable to a quality journal, then its a good gamble...no question of being unethical. Neither the Journal nor the University has put restrictions on the timing of the research conducted/invented.

Answer 7

In this situation, I believe, one has to worry not so much about ethics but rather about whether one contributes to the overall degradation of the quality of information exchanged through scientific publications. For an analogy, when you try to use your car less so as not to contribute to the air pollution too much, this is not the matter of ethics, it is the matter of survival.