Regarding this thread, A really heinous practice is to farm out your manuscript to a number of different publications, dropping those that either rejected the MS or did not return a review too quickly.
I know for a fact this occurs because a graduate student at another institution, for whom I was an informal mentor, once asked me about submission practices in terms of "How many journals should I send this paper to?" When I explained that this was generally thought to be bad practice, she told me that her office mate did this all the time and had published five or six papers from his uncompleted PhD!! Now, either this student was acting in ignorance, in which case his supervisor should have corrected him, OR he acted with the knowledge and perhaps even the collusion of his supervisor, which if true would be unforgivable, and shoudl result in discipline. Such practices not only cheat the majority of scientists who submit their papers to one journal at a time, but they also needlessly consume the valuable time of good reviewers, who are in short enough supply as it is. Ciaou, Andy Park
