Recent encounters with atom-thin salami slicing – Reese Richardson
“Salami slicing” is the practice of taking a set of research findings and splitting them up into as many publishable papers as possible. It is typically regarded as a tactic to inflate the authors’ CVs. As far as I can tell, the first reference to salami to describe this practice came in 1982 in an editorial in Geoscience Canada, following on a 1981 editorial in Science that apparently coined the closely-related concept of the “Least Publishable Unit”. Before that, “salami tactics” were previously described in politics, law and finance. The phrase was initially made popular by the Hungarian Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi, who described his use of szalámitaktika to slice apart the competing ruling party during the Communist Party’s rise to power in Hungary.
Here, I’ve compiled several examples across different fields of what could variously be described as salami slicing, reduction to the Least Publishable Unit, redundant publication, data re-use or just plain fraud. I’ll call it what I see: data stretched to such an extreme that it becomes translucent.
