Karl and Mike both make good points about multiple publications. Yes, if the data are closely related to the same questions, the authors should attempt to publish them together or clearly show how the various publications are connected. That is why we discourage piecemeal publication.
But, as Karl notes, sometimes a research project generates a lot of data, not all of it related to the same topic. It is hard to recruit participants and costly to collect data from them. It is efficient to get as much information about as many questions as we have while we have access to participants. The questions answered by our data don't always hang together nicely as a single package - or even a series of related articles. Mike's examples from the huge published literature are the exceptions. And the example that reads like the Super Bowl list of contenders is a better example of an author asserting the "programmatic" nature of multiple independent research projects than of an author presenting complex data from a single project in linked publications (the pub dates range over a 10 year period, after all - Shiffrin & Schneider's appeared in back-to-back issues of the same journal). I have a colleague who is doing an elaborate longitudinal study on aging. He has collected data on an enormous number of variables. Parts deal with fundamental processes of cognitive change. Others deal strictly with health issues. Still others deal with issues of adjustment and sense of well-being. Each of these is of interest to different audiences. He would be hard pressed to find a journal that would be interested in everything. This raises another question. Must he wait until the 5-year study is "complete" (sometimes these just run until the sample quits responding)? Can he publish interesting findings from year 1 as a cross-sectional study? A well-designed study will have some interesting cross-sectional questions that can be answered with the first cohort. The methods section will refer to an ongoing procedure for data collection, but the procedures remain essentially the same from year to year. It seems silly to demand that a new method section be written each time beyond noting where in the sequence the current set of data were collected. A simple rule of "never use any paragraph of your writing in more than one publication" is easy to apply but certainly misses the nuances of the what the paragraphs have to say, who they are written for, and the other material written for the same work. Claudia Stanny --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
