Professor Gao is the academic equivalent of the band Status Quo, who found success by churning out endless minor variations on the same couple of basic rock songs from the 1970s onwards. It’s very far indeed from Charles Darwin. Gao was engaging in a process that’s become known as ‘salami-slicing’: taking a set of scientific results, often from a single study, that could have been published together as one paper, and splitting them up into smaller sub-papers, each of which can be published separately.23 It’s the closest analogue to the disaster-clean-up drivers who loaded their trucks with wet
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