Paper short abstract:

This presentation is based on extensive materials produced by learned societies, scientific journals and individual researchers and addresses three key issues on the subject of gaming in scientific publishing: the problem of originality, the problem of authorship, the problem of citation uses.

Paper long abstract:

Different forms of gaming practices in scientific publishing have gradually spread, mainly because of evaluation methods applied to researchers and institutions. They have become so common they have led to shared denominations: "salami slicing" for cutting results in smallest publishable units, "gift, ghost or guest authorship" to pin the presence or question the surprising lack of certain authors, "self-promotion" through citation of their previous work for researchers and of their previous published articles for journals. On the background of routinized gaming, affairs and scandals regularly arise, thus creating a double transformation: first, they lead to the qualification of some of its practices as cheating or scientific fraud, second, they are used as motives for the creation of new procedures to reduce potential gaming.

This presentation is based on extensive materials produced by learned societies, scientific journals and individual researchers, mainly in biomedical sciences. It addresses three key issues on the subject of gaming in scientific publishing: the problem of originality, the problem of authorship, the problem of citation uses. It shows how, through borderline cases, gaming practices can be labelled as unproblematic, even strengthening publishing standards by their ironic or demonstrative effect, while others are excluded as being unethical or even deeply menacing scientific integrity.