Salami slicing

Definition: A questionable research/reporting practice strategy, often done post hoc, to increase the number of publishable manuscripts by ‘slicing’ up the data from a single study - one example of a method of ‘gaming the system’ of academic incentives. For instance, this may involve publishing multiple studies based on a single dataset, or publishing multiple studies from different data collection sites without transparently stating where the data originally derives from. Such practices distort the literature, and particularly meta-analyses, because it is unclear that the findings were obtained from the same dataset, thereby concealing the dependencies across the separately published papers.

Related terms: Gaming (the system), Partial publication, Questionable Research Practices or Questionable Reporting Practices (QRPs)

Reference: Fanelli (2018)

Drafted and Reviewed by: Mahmoud Elsherif, Sarah Ashcroft-Jones, Adrien Fillon, Helena Hartmann, Matt Jaquiery, Tamara Kalandadze, Charlotte R. Pennington, Graham Reid, Suzanne L. K. Stewart

Note that we are currently working on an automated mechanism to link references cited above with their full-length version that can be found at https://forrt.org/glossary/references with all references used so far.