Duplicate or multiple publications occur when two or more articles that are not referenced amongst themselves, essentially share the same hypotheses, facts, discussion points and/or conclusions. This may occur in different degrees: literal duplication, partial yet substantial duplication or even paraphrased duplication.

Fragmented or salami publications are manuscripts that introduce the same facts in two or more publications; it consists in dividing or segmenting a large study into two or more publications. Those segments are known as fragments of the study. Overall, the fact that the fragments of a split study share the same hypotheses, population and methods is not an acceptable practice. The same fragment must never be published more than once.

Research fraud refers to the publication of data or conclusions that were not driven by experiments or observations but by data invention or manipulation. There are two types of frauds in scientific and research publications:

• Data fabrication: inventing data and results to subsequently record or communicate it.
• Data falsification: implies the manipulation of research materials, images, data, equipment or processes. Falsification includes modification or omission of data or results which means that the inquiry is not accurately represented. A person could falsify data to adapt it to the intended outcome of a study.

Plagiarism is present in multiple ways, from literal copies to paraphrasing someone else’s work, this encompasses data, words, sentences, ideas, and concepts, there are various levels of seriousness, for instance:

• How much of someone else’s work was taken (several lines, paragraphs, ages, the entire article.)
• What was copied (results, methods or introduction.)

Manipulation of citations: these practices are strongly avoided by authors and by editorial organizations. Citations are manipulated when:

• Editors request editorial texts with citations to published own articles.
• When there is unjustified self-citation.
• When a group of authors agrees to exchange citations.

Editorial spam or self-publishing: this practice consists in contacting via e-mail, authors of graduation, postgraduation theses or end of course papers, to take advantage of the real or aspirational need to begin an academic career, support academic backgrounds or simply thinking that an academic work with a decent grade is good enough to be published  (also called vanity press). 

Academic spam or advertising: this practice is a variation of what is known as vanity press. Editorial companies contact authors via e-mail to offer them the possibility of “showing” their work –paid, in the websites of their companies or of companies they work for, or in commercial magazines aimed at the general public. To make the publication valid, authors must pay and send an abstract written in simple language, with a press release format. 

Use of ambiguous metrics: companies created ex professo by editorials to usufruct open-access publications of dubious quality by producing false indicators (metrics) to attract authors and readers. The names of these  indicators resemble those that are popular, such as the impact factor (WoS) assimilated by the Arab Impact Factor, CiteFactor, Cosmos Impact Factor, Global Impact Factor and many others. There are plenty of variants, these are not just related to indicators, they use DOI and different scores.

Lack of authorization by the ethics committee: every research project must be initially evaluated and authorized by the ethics committee  of the sponsoring institution, it must be stated by the authors to the publishing organization. In case of doubt or if clarification is needed -taking into account that a committee’s approval does not guarantee an ethical research  if the editor deems it necessary, authors may be questioned on ethical aspects and be requested to present proof of the research’s approval, e.g., how did you get the research participants’ consent? 

Biased publications: these are cases in which only favorable results of a study are published, in other words, important data is omitted. This practice may be extremely detrimental in biomedical, pharmaceutical or therapeutical topics, cases in which it is considered fraud.