Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Scan Uncovers Thousands of Copycat Scientific Articles

Database search turns up research papers suspiciously similar to prior publications, prompting investigations
JR Minkel - Scientific American

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.


Wednesday, January 23, 2008

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. They hit on 421 possible duplicates.

After manual inspection they estimated that 0.04% of the 62,000 articles might be plagiarized, and 1.35% duplicates with the same author. These percentages are lower than those calculated by similar previous studies. As yet, the researchers aren't sure why that is.

A thorough examination of apparent duplicates is always essential, they add, to verify whether papers are in fact plagiarised or resubmitted articles, or simply false positives. Some cases of duplication may also be done innocently. The ultimate decision has to be made by an authoritative body such as a journal's editors or an ethics board, they note.

Published online 23 January 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.520

Thursday, January 10, 2008

ERRATA

Retraction: Domain wall solutions in the nonstatic and stationary Godel universes with a cosmological constant [Phys. Rev. D 71, 103503 (2005)]

Ihsan Yilmaz

(Received 8 November 2007; published 7 January 2008)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.77.029901 PACS numbers: 98.80.Cq, 99.10.Ln