Salami slicing

The unit being sliced is one body of work that would be more informative reported whole. A researcher might publish each outcome of a trial separately, or split a cohort by an arbitrary variable into several articles. The motive is usually the pressure to accumulate publications, the least publishable unit strategy taken to its logical extreme.

Beyond padding a CV, the harm is scientific. When overlapping data appear across papers without clear disclosure, meta-analyses can double-count the same participants, overstating the evidence. Readers also struggle to assemble the full picture from scattered fragments, and reviewers may not realize related pieces exist.

Detection relies on spotting shared methods, overlapping samples, and sequential submissions from the same group. Many journals now require authors to disclose related and prior publications and to justify why a dataset supports more than one paper.