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.