Dear Colleagues,
I received a review manuscript in Arabic for publication in AQM, which had been published previously in another journal, but in English. I am wondering if what policies journals or editors adopt towards such submissions!

Haitham T. Idriss
Editor-In-Chief, Annals of Alquds Medicine (AQM)
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I have had experience with this as an author, not as an editor. A journal published in a language other than English contacted me to ask if it could translate and publish an article I had written. This was fine with me, and they sought and obtained permission from the publisher. The article was prefaced by acknowledgement of its prior publication. If you find the article you refer to of sufficient interest, you may wish to follow a similar procedure. If, however, the author is offering it to you as an original work, it may well violate the caveat that most of us require that a manuscript not be under review or published elsewhere.

Rich Rothenberg
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The same thing happened to me. Strictly speaking, I consider this duplicate publication but I would be interested in what others have to say about this. Would it be possible to accept that this is an exception to the rule, assuming that both Journals were aware of what was going on and that the authors acknowledged that this is what they were doing?

I. B. Pless
Editor, Injury Prevention
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As long as it is cited that it is a direct translation from English to Arabic there is no problem. One should get permission to do this from the original journal and the above should be noted in your journal.

Sam Sussman
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This might fall in the category of "acceptable secondary publication " as defined by the International Committees of Medical Journal Editors. Several conditions must be met. These are specified in the Uniform Requirements available at www.icmje.org.

Richard Glass
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Indeed, this is not an uncommon condition in many countries where their mother tongues are not English and whose physicians in need of new information do not have a good command of English. Since as an Editor, one of our responsibilities is to inform our readers of new information, articles, etc, and since many of main-stream journals are currently published in English, I believe, as long as you have permission and mention that the same work is previously published in English (to inform indexing systems, among other people), if you find the article is helpful to your readers, you can (and sometimes, you should) publish it in your local language; Arabic, Persian, etc.

Farrokh Habibzadeh
Deputy Editor, Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences
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I am the editor of Colombia Medica, a Colombian medical journal published in Spanish. We have a section with the name of "From the medical literature" and accept papers published in other journals in different languages from Spanish with reference to Colombian medical problems.

Guillermo Llanos
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I would consider this duplicate publication. I would have no problem with a second journal publishing a translation of an article that had originally been published in another journal in another language. But permission would need to come from whomever holds the copyright for the original article. (For example, an article of mine published in JAMA was reprinted in the Chinese version of JAMA.) But such reprinting should be requested by the second journal, not the author. An author's submitting the translation of an article published in another journal, regardless of the difference in language, is duplicate publishing of the same material.

Bill Tierney
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Thank you all for your useful feedback.

I think we will proceed with reviewing the manuscript in Arabic since I do not anticipate any problem with consent for reproduction in a different language from the first journal.

As pointed out earlier, the ICMJE (www.icmje.org) specifically discusses (and allows) duplicate publication in another language, if certain conditions are first met. To review these, see Overlapping Publications: Acceptable Secondary Publications.

Suzanne Fletcher
Professor of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School
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If you have not read www.icmje.org, don't go to bed tonight without reading it in its entirety. If you have read it but do not remember all of it, go back and memorize it now, every word. Then practice its functions every day. You will then most likely be a competent editor. If you are already competent and experienced, your skills will be improved.

End of Medical Editing 101.

George D Lundberg
Editor-in-Chief, Medscape General Medicine
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As mentioned, this is in the Uniform Requirements. The key points are: first, that the authors mention it in the cover letter, second, that the editors of both journals agree, and third, that the second paper has to include a clear acknowledgment of it, indicating the original title and full reference.

Esteve Fernández
Editor-in-Chief, Gaceta Sanitaria (Journal of the Spanish Society of Public Health and Health Administration)
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The key points clearly defined in the Uniform Requirements regarding acceptable primary and secondary publications of the same paper are totally unknown or purposely ignored by many authors whose mother tongue is not English. The objective is to have the same paper published twice in different languages (almost invariably without cross references to each single unit) just to increase the publication list in the CV. In my experience, a common practice in Spain is to publish in a local journal first, and thereafter (or almost simultaneously) in an indexed English journal (with impact factor, of course!).

Marta Pulido
Freelance author's Editor
Member of the Experts Committee, Medicina Clínica
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Marta makes an important point.

The ICMJE guidelines have been available (and well publicized) for some time, but they have not eradicated bad publication practices.

Most redundant publication comes to light serendipitously (e.g. through a reviewer acting for several journals). The ICMJE call for trial registration may reduce both non-publication and perhaps also the worst cases of redundant publication, but I don't believe it will solve the problem either. What journal editors need is a simple method to discover if a trial has already been published.

If Medline were to include searchable trial identifiers (e.g. registry, ISRCTN or protocol numbers) that would be a big step forward (although it might not prevent duplication in the many non-English journals that are not included in Medline). A simple way to achieve this would be for editors to require the trial identifier to be included in the title.

I'm sure journal editors and the folks at Medline could refine this suggestion to produce something workable (e.g. what to do with papers reviewing data from more than one study).

If you like the idea, you can call it a 'Wager number' ... (!)

Liz Wager
Publications Consultant
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I'd also be suspicious of an author's motives in duplicate publication if the second appearance occurs in English in an international journal. But even then, it would be legitimate if announced in the cover letter. This is fairly common in other disciplines; in some branches of applied linguistics, for example, publication in local proceedings volumes sometimes precedes international journal publication.

However, if the second appearance occurs in a national journal in a local language, I suspect an author's or journal's motive is to gain more local readers and local impact for the ideas expressed (the impact factor itself will hardly be affected), and to help the local journal provide useful articles to readers.

It's good that we've seen several reminders of the ICMJE guidelines on this matter, because as we saw in the discussion of plagiarism a couple of weeks ago, sometimes what looks like a shady practice at first glance is just editorial ignorance or sloppiness.

Hence, there's hope there will be more appropriate and above-board use of this publication option (which brings articles to the eyes of more readers) if all are aware that the ICMJE guidelines explicitly refer to how to do it legitimately. I'd even suggest that editors of national journals include this matter in instructions to authors, and perhaps write editorials about when duplicate publication is and is not appropriate.

Mary Ellen Kerans

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