Publish, flourish or perish: The ups and downs of journal publication

People have been publishing on rock walls for tens of thousands of years (Fig. 1), long before we worked out how to make scrolls from papyrus (Fig. 2). We publish for posterity. There is pride to be had in seeing our names in print, a legacy that cannot be taken away from us. In paediatrics, we may publish to educate or to entertain or both. Why, it even emerged that ever since 1997, starting with a paper in Nature Medicine entitled ‘Nitric oxide and inflammation: the answer is blowing in the wind’, a group of scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden had been sneaking Bob Dylan lyrics into the titles of their papers for a challenge. A recent editorial discussed ‘publication addiction’ as a behavioural addiction, analogous to gambling, excessive smartphone use and unrestrained video game playing. While the author clearly intended the article to be light-hearted, including a photo of a nest that birds had constructed on issues of the journal left on his desk, he made some serious points about the perils of publication addiction which he said, can lead to salami publication, duplicate publications, plagiarism and fabricated results. While slicing up the data from a single study to make multiple papers (salami publication) may constitute publication impropriety, journal editors also have to be alert for fraudulent activities. If an author publishes the same study in two different journals, a meta-analysis may incorporate the same results twice, so duplicate publication risks being scientifically misleading. Most journals screen papers for prior publication of part or all of the paper, using software that generates a Similarity Index. Many authors copy and paste multiple small snippets from other articles, often because of language difficulties, which is understandable and excusable if the science is original and valid. In contrast, we occasionally find a submitted paper has been published in its entirety elsewhere by different authors, true plagiarism. When this happens, most editors’ action will be guided by the algorithms published by the Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE (https:// publicationethics.org/). Recently, although we ask authors of