Comments on: Listen carefully, I shall say this only once

By: sean.salvador

sean.salvador — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:57:11 +0000

Yes, its about taking that ‘lest publishable unit ans rounding all the numbers down. You then bank the unpublishable units. Imagine millions of bank accounts and transactions, billions even, everyday where all the small fractions of a penny are rounded down, thats a lot of money no? now imagine banking them! thats salami slicing as i know it.

By: kleptonat

kleptonat — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:02:43 +0000

Salami slicing and the least publishable unit.

It’s wiki, but it’s a good description.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit

By: kleptonat

kleptonat — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:55:44 +0000

Sean

Can you offer an alternative definition of Salami slicing perhaps?

By: sean.salvador

sean.salvador — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:38:52 +0000

kleptonat

No, that is not Salami slicing at all.
Sorry, just thought i’d point that out (i’m a pedant like most in here. It’s like Americans with irony that one).

By: monoculus

monoculus — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:39:40 +0000

This is really a failure of the review process. If the peer reviewers had had a look at the references, they might have caught the duplication prior to publication.

This can be tough to catch when manuscripts are submitted concurrently to different journals, as looks to be the case here. However, reviewers can and should request to see manuscripts cited as “submitted” when doing their reviews.

By: The Biologista

The Biologista — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:47:13 +0000

Thanks for the link pseudomonas. Its a step in the right direction anyway…

By: pseudomonas

pseudomonas — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:40:05 +0000

(OK, to be fair the Deja vu system is only run on the Medline database, so only on abstracts and simple metadata, but it makes an interesting read, anyway).

By: pseudomonas

pseudomonas — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:25:27 +0000

IMSoP: You mean, like http://spore.swmed.edu/dejavu/duplicate/ ?

By: aidan

aidan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:54:57 +0000

… or, or as well as, a database of duplicate trials? anyone could flag a matching pair, then maybe a few moderators for different research fields, could ok it, and it goes in the database. then you’ve got a list of studies to discount from a meta analysis. and you could generate data on which topics, researchers, products, etc., do the most duplicate trials, and where they’re most published.

By: The Biologista

The Biologista — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:07:46 +0000

Just an algorithm that scans through Pubmed or some sort of centralised database of everyone’s raw data? Either might certainly make matters clearer. I’m sure some creative statistics/normalisation/unit changes could fool an algorithm though. And we’d be back to doing it by hand again.

By: IMSoP

IMSoP — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:50:40 +0000

Maybe someone should develop an automated system for detecting duplicate publication. Something along the lines of the anti-plagiarism systems used by some Universities, but with particular algorithms for detecting and comparing raw data, and so on.

This could be run by the editors of the journals themselves, and also by anyone with electronic access to the relevant journals. Then if a journal failed to follow up an indication of duplication, and at least print an appropriate clarification, it would be painfully obvious that they’d done so.

By: The Biologista

The Biologista — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:43:15 +0000

“Jesus”. Is all I can say. On the upside, this proves that we can publish almost any crap. Twice.

By: Robert Carnegie

Robert Carnegie — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 23:42:32 +0000

The Durham fish oil…incident, couldn’t be a work of evil genius, perhaps? Or would you expect an evil genius to be cleverer at it – or maybe they were just clever enough?

By: mjs

mjs — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 23:23:31 +0000

“Of course I prescribe it”, you can hear the doctors say: “I’ve seen two trials but, ha! I never read them showing that it works”.

I would hope not. The titles of the papers are strikingly similar. Even the abstracts look a lot like mirror images.

Who would cite a study as a reason to prescribe, based only on unsubstantiated rumor?

…Oh. Heh, right. I forgot.

By: kleptonat

kleptonat — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 21:47:05 +0000

As an aside the colloquial name for the practice of taking a single clinical trial and publishing multiple papers out of it focussing on a different outcome measure each time is “Salami Slicing”

As such snide comments about what seems to be the thickness of ones lunch meat are in fact seriously questioning ones academic honesty. One research group in my field seems to get away with very thin lunch meat in most of their publications and it really pisses some of us off.

Secondly, Ben, rubbish uncontrolled open label treatment cohort studies such as the one that ClinPsych have found double-published are bad. But they are not as bad as RCTs being salami sliced. They won’t end up in most meta-analyses because they’ll get thrown out as being too low on methodological quality to be included. So they have less chance to muck up clinical practice.

By: peterd102

peterd102 — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:47:05 +0000

Nicely Spotted. Id like it to be noted that this can work both ways, we are just cynical people. There can be publication bias away form positive studies if there are already a few good ones out there, orif the data isnt very impressive. There can be duplicate negative studies too. However whichever way they swing they are still going to be an appalling problem.