Content area
Full Text
'Redundant' and 'incremental' describe works in which authors largely rewrite th eir earlier publications to only slightly altered effect. Editors of scholarly journals ofte n find it difficult to identify submissions of these kinds, which can undermine the integrity of journa ls that promise their readers originality and exclusivity. A few rules for editors, and some pr ecautions for authors, will help prevent embarrassments.
COMMUNICATION THEORY VIEWS the information content of a message as consisting of redundancy (that which is predictable) and entropy (that which is new and unpredictable).(f.1) Redundancy reduces the value of a communication: 'The high est value for the information content is assigned to the message that is the least probable [i e, has the least redundancy]. If a message is expected with certainty its information content is 0.'(f.2) Similar reduction of information content occurs when a reader encounters familiar materi al in a scholarly article, a situation that can arise when an author purports to present new mater ial but in fact repeats what he or she has published elsewhere. In my first half year as editor of Hispania, I encountered six such cases, which led me to believe that it was a common practic e. Nevertheless, my research on the subject turned up only one article that address ed the issue - and then only indirectly - in relation to incremental or 'fractionalized' public ation.(f.3)
One would think, then, that my experience represented isolated instances of such publication; however, a 1992 exchange of correspondence in the New England Journal of Medicine led me to believe that red undant publication is instead a problem that frequently goes undetected and underreport ed, one that editors of journals that invite only unpublished submissions are understandably reluctant to air in public, especially after the fact. The full page of discussion in the New En gland Journal led in turn to a trail of prior incidents dating back to 1977, the same year in whic h results of a survey published in Scholarly Publishing of thirty - three editors of sociologic al journals did not produce a single mention of duplicate or simultaneous publication as a problem.( f.4)
Redundancy is not a concern for all scholarly journals and editors. Some r outinely publish reprints, which...