Duplicate publication and plagiarism: causes and cures

Duplicate publication and plagiarism are often referred to in a similar context, but their origins, issues, and remedies are sub-stantially different. When an author in-tentionally or unintentionally republish-es his or her own work without informing the editor of the previous publication, the result is duplicate publication. Duplicate publication is a form of redundant publi-cation and refers to publication of an arti-cle in which the content overlaps substan-tially with one΄s paper already published in print or electronically [1]. Duplicate publication often violates copyright law and, in the case of multiply published studies, distorts results of meta-analyses, because if the duplication is not detected the results of the duplicate publications influence the meta-analyses results more than would a single publication [2, 3].