Simultaneous submission, duplicate publication, self-plagiarism and the proper management.

Dear Sir,

The recent article on simultaneous submission and duplicate publication is very interesting.[1] In fact, the problem of duplicate submission and self-plagiarism is a common kind of misconduct. The problem cannot be said that it is innocent. The role of the journal to prevent and respond to the detected problem is very important.[2] For prevention of the problem, the authors should be automatically warned for avoiding both plagiarism and self-plagiarism during submission process. In case that the problem is detected, the withdrawal of the duplicated publication has to be done. However, the important consideration is why the author(s) who simultaneously submit the duplicated work to several journals dare to perform this misconduct. The possible explanation might include: (a) The author(s) think that the journal cannot detect the problem, (b) the author(s) might neglect the communication with the first journal, such as request for revision and submit the work to the second journal without official manuscript withdrawal note to the first journal, (c) the submissions are performed by different corresponding authors in the team and etc. For any reason, the practice is considered an unacceptable misconduct. Sometimes, the problem might be very difficult to detect. The duplication might be in the form of conference proceedings, which cannot be easily searched from international journal databases (such as PubMed).[2] Sometimes, the authors might be more tricky to performed a salami publication with many self-plagiarised materials in the two submitted works (for example, see and consider these two proceedings with highly similarity - “New hydrid of partial transmit sequences and cascade adaptive peak power reduction [PT-CAPPR] methods for peak-to-average power radio [PAPR] reduction in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing [OFDM] systems”[3] and “New PAPR reduction in OFDM systems using union algorithm of WL-SLM and CAPPR technique,”[4] these two reports share several textual and figure repetitions with few difference).