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Published online 23 January 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.520
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How many papers are just duplicates?
Study hints at plagiarism and re-publication in biomedical papers.
As many as 200,000 of the 17 million articles in the Medline database might be duplicates, either plagiarized or republished by the same author in different journals, according to a commentary published in Nature today1.
Mounir Errami and Harold ‘Skip’ Garner at the The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, used text-matching software to look for duplicate or highly-similar abstracts in more than 62,000 randomly selected Medline abstracts published since 1995.
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The most terrible fact aren't DUPLICATED articles, in my opinion, but the ignorance of the vast majority of those who want give medical information. In Nature PG Clinical Practice Endocrinology & Metabolism, current number - as I wrote immediately to Editorial board of the Journal - a Paper title sounds OGTT should be performed when patients with acute myocardial infarction are discharged 65 doi:10.1038/ncpendmet0711. Such as distressing event indicates that Nature Editors, Authors, Reviewers, Readers aren't unfortunately up-dated, ignoring the real exsistence of biophysical Semeiotic Constitutions, including Diabetic Constitution and related INHERITED Real Risk, conditio sine qua non of diabetes, that are the fundaments of Single Patient Based Medicine. In France, some coleagues are thinking about SPBM:http://www.serpsy.org/humeurs/lottin_07.html -En Italie, le docteur Sergio STAGNARO a publié un ouvrage « La médecine basée sur le patient singulier » aussitôt traduit en anglais « Single-patient based medicine » dans un but de lobbying, qui connaît un grand succès au point que même le très conservateur Commissaire européen à la santé, l’irlandais BYRNES en a fait son livre de chevet. Il a été référencé par PLOS Medicine, et par la National Library of Medicine de Washington. However, the highest task of Nature policy-making seems to be "hidden" criticism!
Journal editors should also remind reviewers of using the text-matching software.
I think this is a very good thing to pursue. It is part of an auditing process that I think is long overdue. One question I have, not having access to details, is what the status of duplicate studies is in this article? What I am getting at here is that something I have been a little troubled by is the short schrift given to duplicated experiments for confirmation. I think these are even more important today, with the complexity and sensitivity to error of difficult procedures, particularly in the biosciences where it is common for scientists to use instruments that they do not fully understand. So, would such work show up as a hit in automated systems? I suspect it would be hard for them not to. While the hit(s) could be explained, and a human reader would see the difference, we are making more and more use of automated methods of rating each other, are we not? (viz. Impact factors and publication lists) Perhaps there should be a way for scientists to publish and specifically designate their paper as "Confirmatory work"? Automated confusion is probably less likely when negative results are published, but as a separate but somewhat related matter, negative results in general are quite hard to publish. And yet, how many times have some of us done some experiments and then heard from an older scientist, "Oh, we tried that 10 years ago. Didn't work." Perhaps something could be done in the world of editors to try to work with these related issues?
This research is useful given the emphasis on "productivity" by universities when granting tenure. But I wonder about the duplicates that are translations from other languages. Should they be in the same category? Cheryl Lans
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I think this study poses intriguing questions about the reasons why so many duplicates appear in these databases. One of them is about the concept of redundant publications. It seems to me that it is not clear cut among researchers and that different academic traditions may have different attitudes toward redundancy. Is there a consensus among journals from different fields? I don’t think so, and I believe this is one of the reasons why some authors may find that publishing translations of published articles in another journal may be legitimate. Also, it appears that there is some confusion when it comes to borrowing from one’s own work. Whereas some authors assume that borrowing extracts from their own previous publications (without citation) is plagiarism, some may think that it’s legitimate borrowing. “How many papers are just duplicates?†is a timely question, and I think text-matching softwares are fundamental tools to help respond it. However, I think that duplicates and plagiarism may be reduced if journals and educators placed more emphasis on informing especially newcomers in academia.
I think this study poses intriguing questions about the reasons why so many duplicates appear in these databases. One of them is about the concept of redundant publications. It seems to me that it is not clear cut among researchers and that different academic traditions may have different attitudes toward redundancy. Is there a consensus among journals from different fields? I don’t think so, and I believe this is one of the reasons why some authors may find that publishing translations of published articles in another journal may be legitimate. Also, it appears that there is some confusion when it comes to borrowing from one’s own work. Whereas some authors assume that borrowing extracts from their own previous publications (without citation) is plagiarism, some may think that it’s legitimate borrowing. “How many papers are just duplicates?†is a timely question, and I think text-matching softwares are fundamental tools to help respond it. However, I think that duplicates and plagiarism may be reduced if journals and educators placed more emphasis on informing especially newcomers in academia.