Q: Is it duplicate submission if a small part of two papers in two different languages is the same?

Detailed Question -

I have two review articles, one in Chinese and the other in English.The English one contains a small portion of the content from the Chinese one. I'll submit the English one to an English journal, the Chinese to a Chinese journal. Will this be duplicate submission? Anything I should pay special attention to? Many thanks!

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

If only a small part of the content is the same in both papers, it is more likely to be considered a case of self-plagiarism rather than duplicate submission. However, either way, it is not really ethical unless you are transparent about it. Therefore, it's best to cross-cite the papers, that is, cite the Chinese paper in the English one and the English paper in the Chinese one. However, since you haven't submitted either of the papers yet, it might be a good idea to put it a comment or a footnote saying that the cited work is still not published and that you will update the citation once the paper is accepted for publication.  

Do go through the following posts for more information on plagiarism:

We also have an excellent course on How to avoid plagiarism that you might find helpful.