Salami slicing, shingling, and meat extending are all fanciful terms for a thorny and often overlookedissue. Publication overlap—the presentation of redundant ideas or data in multiple papers by the sameauthors—is a practice that warrants serious discussion. When there is little to no publication overlap, thefindings in one paper lead to new ideas and the collection of new data, producing a paper trail of scien-tific progress that moves the field forward (Fig. 1). At the other extreme, authors present the same textand data in two papers, which is usually a clear violation of journal copyright policies (“dual publica-tion,” Merrill 2015). In between these two extremes are different degrees and forms of overlap that mayresult in multiple low- impact papers. For example, authors may ask the same question with differentdatasets, or they may ask different questions with the same dataset. In these cases, authors have to crit-ically evaluate whether publishing multiple separate but overlapping papers is in the best interest of thescience community or whether it is self- serving. We aim to spur conversation about the consequencesof publication overlap in the ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) community, where discussions ofthis issue are lacking despite the pressure to “publish or perish.”.
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