Ethical Authorship and the Ingelfinger Rule in the Digital Age

Ophthalmology's Guide for Authors includes a policy regarding prior and repetitive publication that states: “The Journal will not consider manuscripts that have appeared, in part or in total, in other publications, except in special circumstances approved by the Editor-in-Chief.” This is the Ingelfinger rule, which was written 44 years ago by Dr. Franz J. Ingelfinger and has been adopted widely by most peer-reviewed medical journals. The burden of ethical responsibility for upholding the Ingelfinger rule lies squarely on the shoulders of the authors, although editors and reviewers police this to the best of their ability. In recent years, compliance with this rule has become increasingly challenging for authors, with a flood of information about their work in the public domain, improved information-gathering methods for the non–peer-reviewed medical media, and evolution of new means for communicating scientific information.