What are the ins and outs of submitting two related papers that need to cite each other to the same or different journals? Potential pitfalls? [duplicate]

Question

I'm currently in the middle of some calculations and modeling for two related but different papers on experimental and data analysis mathematical techniques, and have started drafting two papers.

Depending on how they fill out over the next few months they may or may not be best suited for the same journal.

Each paper and its readers will be best served if it references the other, and this may be in fact necessary to avoid having to have duplicate sections and trying to do extra work to make sure they are also sufficiently different that they are not copy/pastes of each other (i.e. avoidance of self-plagiarism?¹).

The topics are sufficiently divergent that they really can not be combined into a single paper without it looking like two papers hastily duct-taped together.

Question: What are the ins and outs of submitting two related papers that need to cite each other to the same or different journals? Any potential pitfalls I should keep in mind?

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¹ Using same text in different papers sent same time? See also "Is there any reason why your papers can't cross-cite each other?" and "You can actually cross-cite papers that are 'work in progress', especially in initial submissions."

Answer 1

Conferences and journals want contributions that are reasonably self-contained. This means, some duplicate paragraphs might be needed. You need to then cite the paper containing the duplicates, even if the duplicates are not exact. You might want to explain the other work, referring to it as under submission. There is nothing wrong with an introduction that explains (among all the other things that an introduction needs to explain) that the same model can be used for two very different applications.

It is hard and somewhat unfair to cite something that reviewers (and later readers) cannot access and that also might not be published at all or only appear after a long delay. Think about publishing a Technical Report or a preprint first for both articles, so that you can refer to the other one that way. If you are lucky, you might then update the mutual citation in both.