In my field (road safety) we often need to consider the “grey” literature as well as peer reviewed publications, and this problem is common. It is not unusual for a non-peer reviewed conference paper to be recycled between conferences, or to be turned into a peer-reviewed publication with sometimes few changes. None of this is necessarily malpractice, because passage into the “true” scientific arena is seen as being a peer review publication, and many of the writers are practitioners rather than academics, but it means that we have to be watchful for duplication when reviewing literature or conducting meta-analyses. I guess it’s clear that this has to apply to the peer reviewed literature as well..
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