A new computerized scan of the biomedical research literature has turned up tens of thousands of articles in which entire passages appear to have been lifted from other papers. Based on the study, researchers estimate that there may be as many as 200,000 duplicates among some 17 million papers in leading research database Medline.
The finding has already led one publication to retract a paper for being too similar to a prior article by another author.
Researchers Mounir Errami and Harold "Skip" Garner of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas used a text-matching algorithm to compare seven million Medline abstracts against matching entries flagged by the database's software as being closely related.
The researchers set their own software tool, called eTBLAST, to identify pairs that were more than 45 percent identical, Errami says. The search turned up more than 70,000 hits, which the researchers and a team of three assistants have been manually checking. So far, Errami says they have gone through close to 3,000 pairs of abstracts or the full articles, if the duplicates have different authors. He notes that some matches were found to be innocent duplications, such as reprints or translations.
But in 79 cases (and counting), duplicates with different authors had no obviously legitimate explanation. The group has set up a public Web site, Déjà vu, to document the findings.
The next step in these cases of potential plagiarism, the researchers say, is for journals to investigate. In a Nature report, they advise other scientists "to withhold judgment of any candidate duplicates until evaluated by a suitable body such as an editorial board or a university ethics committee."
They note that most of the questionable duplicates inspected thus far appear to be papers submitted by the same authors to multiple journals, a less serious ethical lapse that allows researchers to artificially inflate their publication credits and give added weight to their work.
Errami and Garner estimate that perhaps 50,000 of the eTBLAST hits and 200,000 (0.01 percent) of the 17 million–plus Medline entries will turn out to be either plagiarized or multiple listings.
Prior studies have come up with different duplication rates. In a 2002 blind survey of 3,247 biomedical researchers by the University of Minnesota, 4.7 percent admitted that they had republished papers and 1.4 percent confessed to borrowing from others' work. A 2006 analysis of more than 280,000 papers in the physics preprint database arXiv, led by a U.S. computer scientist, found that 30,316 (10.5 percent) were suspected duplicates, and 677 (0.2 percent) were potentially plagiarized.
Action and Retraction
The U.T. Southwestern authors uncovered three cases in which their own colleagues may have been ripped off. Errami and Garner alerted the authors and journals involved, which they say has led to probes by the implicated publications.
One investigation has already led to a retraction: Journal publisher Elsevier is retracting a 2004 review paper (summarizing existing research) by rheumatologist Lee Simon of Harvard Medical School, says Shira Tabachnikoff, director of corporate relations at Elsevier. According to the Déjà vu entry, 55 percent of Simon's text, published in Best Practice & Research Clinical Rheumatology, closely matches that of a paper published a year earlier by U.T. Southwestern rheumatologist Roy Fleischmann in Expert Opinion on Drug Safety.
A review by SciAm.com of both articles confirmed that multiple consecutive pages of text in Simon's 32-page article were nearly identical to passages in Fleischmann's 19-page paper; of the 161 references listed in the later paper, nearly all were listed in the 2003 publication in the same nonalphabetical, nonchronological order.
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Add Commenta clear case of Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisstill hate these kinds of plagiarisms or copycats, at least to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe plagiarism is hate anyone. The use of other article backbone to publish an article is very bad in science. The similarity in articles in the results must not occur because it shows the new idea or findings of the article. But in other parts of article such as; introduction, materials and methods the similarity and caption can be occur, specially when the author(s) not be native english writer. The use of other publisher sentences in the article in some situation make the writer easy to write correct sentences according to grammar and syntax. In the results section of an article, the article must have new findings with enough points. By the way, I hate these kind of writing and prefer to write by own conclusion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe plagiarism is hate anyone. The use of other article backbone to publish an article is very bad in science. The similarity in articles in the results must not occur because it shows the new idea or findings of the article. But in other parts of article such as; introduction, materials and methods the similarity and caption can be occur, specially when the author(s) not be native english writer. The use of other publisher sentences in the article in some situation make the writer easy to write correct sentences according to grammar and syntax. In the results section of an article, the article must have new findings with enough points. By the way, I hate these kind of writing and prefer to write by own conclusion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn attenuated line of Leishmania major (L. major H-line) has been established by
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisculturing promastigotes in vitro under gentamicin pressure. A modification of the
previously described method for the generation of attenuated line of L. major is
described: attenuated parasite emerged after 8 rather than 12 subpassages. No lesions
developed in BALB/c mice infected with L. major H-line, whereas L. major wild-type
(WT) induced Th2 like response with progressive lesions. Analysis of IgG1 and IgG2a
antibody levels during infection and quantification of splenocyte IFN-γ and IL-4
production following stimulation with promastigotes shows that the L. major H-line
preferentially induces Th1-like responses and possibly down-regulates Th2 responses in
BALB/c mice. L. major H-line parasites remained localized in the skin and draining
lymph node, whereas L. major WT parasites disseminated into the visceral organs of
BALB/c mice. Mice vaccinated by with L. major H-line acquired resistance against L.
major WT. These results show the attenuated cell line of L. major is not only avirulent
but that it may also modulate the host immune response and is a candidate as an
attenuated live vaccine against Leishmania.