Research Publications

[oathkeeper]

General question about research. I've been collecting data for the past few years on program development- specifically psychological treatment interventions for a specific population. Several students would like to publish off this data (specific subsets of it, including a medical fellow) as would I. Each of us would be looking at different parts of the data (eg- looking at medical markers of treatment efficacy, looking at specific subset of comorbidity)- but wondering how this typically works to have potentially multiple publications off of one sample. We had a pretty wide variety of of out come measures that looked at various aspects of the treatment.

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[szymk1sm]

Perhaps others who know more will chime in, but my question is whether you can publish program development data?

My understanding was that program development (i.e., data collected without an informed consent) could be used internally, but that you could not publish this data in a journal, as the participants did not provide consent for their information to be used in this manner. You may be able to create a database via a retrospective / medical chart review with your IRB. If I am incorrect in my understanding, I would appreciate feedback.

If you are able to publish, then I don't see why it would be a problem to have many projects stemming from this single dataset. I've been able to do this..

 

[oathkeeper]

I worked with our research and irb department and it thankfully got approved as a retrospective medical chart review since all of the data we collected was standard of care. So we’re good to publish!

 

[Mama Bear]

Is your post a concern about data slicing?

 

[WisNeuro]

If the dataset is large enough, and the projects stemming from it different enough in nature and scope, it's fine. The ethical issue that some fail to grasp sometimes in these situations is breaking up similar data into smaller articles purely to increase quantity of pubs, when the analyses would otherwise have fit very well together in a single article. Or, if people are simply p-hacking the data to find anything that is "significant" and then shoe horning an article around that.

 

[beginner2011]

If the dataset is large enough, and the projects stemming from it different enough in nature and scope, it's fine. The ethical issue that some fail to grasp sometimes in these situations is breaking up similar data into smaller articles purely to increase quantity of pubs, when the analyses would otherwise have fit very well together in a single article. Or, if people are simply p-hacking the data to find anything that is "significant" and then shoe horning an article around that.

I wonder sometimes where the line is between "smaller articles purely to increase quantity of pubs" and "analyses would have fit very well together in a single article." As I'm starting to publish more on my own research program and as a lead author I know I've had several conversations now with collaborators/mentors about this, and there seems to be a lot more grey area. In other words, I'd argue there are valid reasons to break up analyses that could fit well together in a single article into multiple brief reports aside from just wanting to "increase quantity of pubs." To name a few, as an early career investigator: increase impact of the research (getting a broad research program pigeon-holed into one article is a risk), reaching different audiences, ensuring acceptability to the editorial board/reviewers, novel research directions requiring dissemination before synthesis, etc. Not to mention the practical difficulty of paring down a manuscript describing multiple innovative studies into a small 3500 word package.

 

[WisNeuro]

I wonder sometimes where the line is between "smaller articles purely to increase quantity of pubs" and "analyses would have fit very well together in a single article." As I'm starting to publish more on my own research program and as a lead author I know I've had several conversations now with collaborators/mentors about this, and there seems to be a lot more grey area. In other words, I'd argue there are valid reasons to break up analyses that could fit well together in a single article into multiple brief reports aside from just wanting to "increase quantity of pubs." To name a few, as an early career investigator: increase impact of the research (getting a broad research program pigeon-holed into one article is a risk), reaching different audiences, ensuring acceptability to the editorial board/reviewers, novel research directions requiring dissemination before synthesis, etc. Not to mention the practical difficulty of paring down a manuscript describing multiple innovative studies into a small 3500 word package.

Multiple innovative studies is one thing, breaking apart small, iterative studies is another. There's definitely some grey area here, but there I've definitely seen people CV padding before. If it makes sense to break things apart, that's great. But, if you're making 3 brief report papers out of what should just be one standard length paper that fits together, you need to re-evaluate your ethics.

 

[Mama Bear]

There’s articles you could review that provide some guidance to avoid data slicing.

 

[Ollie123]

A little swamped right now, but just popping in quickly because I saw this. Its not unusual for program evals to be published, even if explicit research consent was not obtained at the time. IRBs usually have processes in place for revising data that is collected as part of program evals, QI, etc. and applying secondary data analyses to it. Usually there are some additional securities in place to ensure anonymity, etc. Its essentially the same method used for EHR analysis and the like.

Beyond that, it really just depends and others are correct that there is a TON of grey area here. Some depends on the scope of the project. Trying to eek 7 papers out of a small pilot from a master's thesis is different than generating 3 from a multi-million dollar R01. Large epi studies will sometimes have hundreds (if not thousands) of papers from a single dataset. Available guidance on the topic is - in my experience - incredibly vague. Really, I think its just a "you know it when you see it" kind of thing and there is a difference between 1-2 grey area "Ehhh....I guess I can see it, but I probably wouldn't have split that up" papers versus someone who routinely does it. And at a certain point, you know the folks in your field who make it a habit. We're commonly collecting data across a huge number of modalities now and it would be utterly incoherent to integrate behavioral mechanisms with clinical outcomes, neuroimaging mediators that may or may not be moderated by a different imaging modality baseline scan, combining with 'omics data gathered from a supplement, etc.

Not sure if this helps. If you want to PM specifics, I'm happy to share whether it passes my personal sniff test for whatever that is worth, but I would encourage you to just do so with colleagues. Unfortunately, I think the "sniff test" is about all we have at this point. Generally speaking, I think a lot depends on a serious look at your own motivations and whether its realistic to make something one paper. If something <can> be one <reasonably> large but coherent paper, it probably should be. If the only desire to not do so is so everyone can get publications, that is a problem. If its asking different research questions that would be incoherent in combination, its fine to split. In between, it gets murky.

 

[futureapppsy2]

Also, sometimes, reviewers and editors will "guide" you one way or another. We did a study where we collected data from both paraprofessionals/support staff and counselors regarding a particular aspect of training/practice. My original idea was the analyze the data together, but the feedback from both reviewers and editors was strongly that the data on the two populations needed to be analyzed and published separately.