The tale of two ethical or unethical duplicate publications in one or more journals: Inclusion or exclusion decisions in a systematic review

Funny game, publish or perish. It pushes people to cut the sausage into salami, co-submit to several journals, or co-publish in more than one journal.

During De-Duplication Stage

One of the information professionals found the same paper but in two different journals during de-duplication. Should we remove one of them as a duplicate?

What is a duplicate record? A duplicate bibliographic record in a systematic review context is a record that has as same as or very similar bibliographic information to another record among your search results or in your database. Bibliographic information is authors, publication year, the title of records, source/journal, volume, issues, page numbers, DOI, and so on. Since records in all databases are not always keeping their records up-to-date, a duplicate record is not always an exact match to another record because it may contain publication year from the pre-pagination version — when the journal publishes the accepted paper early and assigns it to a journal issue with page numbers 1–5 years later — or when databases miss some of the bibliographic information. For more information, please see typology of duplicate records.

While there are many automated and semi-automated methods to find these duplicates, there is no method with 100% sensitivity and specificity to do the de-duplication for you without causing paranoia of what if the machine is wrong.

One of the strange cases you may face is finding the same paper published in two or more journals. Since the sources/journals of the papers are…