More duplicate papers being published?
Corie Lok
Thursday, 24 January 2008 19:54 UTC
Nature this week has published a commentary by two researchers who say there may be a growing problem with the publication of duplicate papers in different journals, either through plagiarism or self-plagiarism (similar papers with the same author).
Mounir Errami and Harold Garner of the U of Texas Southwestern Medical Center report how they searched and analyzed more than 62,000 abstracts indexed in Medline and found that 1.35 percent of them were duplicates with the same authors (the authors give caveats for this analysis so please read the commentary). They say that with the rapid growth in the number of journals and papers, publishers and database curators have not kept up with the detection of duplicate papers. They call on journals to use new software tools to better identify duplicate papers and on the community to expose people who are clearly not following established publishing policies.
What do you think? Have you seen more duplicate papers published in your field?
Do you think this is a real problem?
Are there legitimate reasons to publish similar versions of the same paper in different journals?
What else can be done to prevent this problem from growing?
Before diving into the conversation, please have a close read of the commentary. The authors there give plenty of caveats for their Medline analysis, which I didn’t summarize fully in this post.
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Hello everyone. M.E. (the co-author of the Nature manuscript we are dealing with here). Well I have tried to read all the comments but there are too many. I am glad however that our work is generating so many reactions (around the globe). By the way, I just wanted to inform you that some official statements may be coming out soon regarding some of our findings. In other words, you may see some retractions…
I will update as statements become official.M.E.
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Thanks Mounir for joining in. We look forward to hearing more news, so glad to hear you’ll be posting them here.
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There seems to be a view that duplicate publication is some sort of scientific misconduct. I can certainly understand that editors and publishers of scientific journals will not like duplicate publications. I can also see that if people publish the same paper in numerous journals to “up” their paper number to try and gain promotion, then this is ethically dubious to say the least.
On the other hand, as scientists, one of our roles is to communicate what we do, and as such we may give the same presentation at numerous conferences, or meetings, and I do not see any great distinction in this compared to publishing the same information in different locations. It certainly is not scientific misconduct, in my view, if the aim of the scientist is to communicate what they do to a wider audience. For scientists who work in industry, it is often a great help to their customers to publish work in Europe, Asia and the US (or to present the same information at conferences), often the same work may be translated into different languages too. In this instance, scientists in industry are simply doing their job.
There are also many well-known scientists that have published numerous books, which essentially contain the same information. I don’t think anyone would accuse these people of misconduct.
Finally, if I self-plagiarise, do I have to complain to myself !! If I find a nice phrase or paragraph that I use in my research, of course I will use it again in other articles. Is it misconduct – of course not ! -
Elsevier launched an investigation of an author, a Harvard researcher, who wrote a review for one of its journals—a review that was flagged in Errami’s and Garner’s analysis as a possible duplicate, according to the Boston Globe and the Dallas Morning News.
I’ve gotten confirmation from an Elsevier spokesman that the paper in question is being retracted by the journal.
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This sort of thing must result, at least in part, from silly methods of assessing people.
Here are two articles that I believe to be relevant.Peter A. Lawrence The Mismeasurement of Science. Current Biology, August 7, 2007: 17 (15), r583. (see it here )
and my own article in Physiology News, 69, 12 – 14, 2007 (get it here)
I do hope that those responsible for assessment, and for the next RAE, have thought about what is in these papers, but see little sign of it.
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David,
thanks a lot for pointing out these two papers. I would like to mention another paper that looks at the same issues from a journal perspective.
Brown H. How impact factors changed medical publishing – and science. BMJ 2007;334:561-64.
Duplicate papers are just a symptom of the increasing use of impact factors to evaluate science and scientists.
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I have read the comments I there are various things I would like to touch one here. So I will try to make it short.
1- In response to Robert, I would say I would agree that some duplications are legit, for example to allow a wider dissemination of knowledge. However this seems the exception more than a rule (we did some stats about this). Now translations are more than OK, but the problem here is about acknowledgment. Often times there is no mention of the fact that this is a translation. The authors then get credit for a work they copied.
I also want to add that aside from copyright issues raised earlier by Hilary S., I think it is more than OK to reuse certain pieces of text, and specially intro and methods. It tends to standardize a practice and it has some benefits.2- The issue of co-submission has been interesting to us because there is potentially no way to catch these duplications before they make it to publication. Unless editors would put their manuscripts in the pipeline into a (private) central database that they would share (easier said than done), then I don’t see how we can solve this issue. The best way (like with students), is to openly state that papers are regularly checked with automated tools, and more importantly to take action when necessary. As you may know investigations triggered by our work are in progress, one of which resulted into a retraction (scientific american’s reporter JR Minkel published an article about this, and had the chance to get a reply from the author of the duplication, interesting). This type of actions will certainly make authors think about trying to duplicate (even via a co-submission)
3- This also shows that we have to adapt in the way we gauge scientist’s expertise, productivity and maturity. Like an other contributor to this forum, I think that more than quantity, quality matters. A few key papers may be worth more than the entire list of publication (especially if this list contains some questionable publications)
4- Finally I’d like to say that in spite of all this, the Medline database is in very good shape. These questionable practices represent 1% of cases, meaning that 99% are OK. The peer-review process like any other is probably imperfect, yet I would say it is excellent and it surely is the best of all (imagine an automatic review process…)
M.E.
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Anonymous
First, I think Dr. Errami and his team should be congratulated on their detection system. One can browse though the many duplicate publications in their database and find obvious cases of plagiarism. I have pointed out this database to a colleagues over the last few days, and it is interesting that the name they search for first is their own! Plagiarism is still taboo.
As I pointed out to Hilary Spencer on a related blog, new detection methods are only a first step. There needs to be more effective penalties for plagiarists, or the problem will keep growing due to the ease of cut and paste. My own, once-prestigious university cut and pasted 100 lines of scientific text, absolutely verbatim without permission, attribution or acknowledgement, from a published scientific article into a US patent. The original paper was co-authored by a PhD graduate student and university faculty.
Following official complaints, the university investigated itself, and senior administrators deemed such patent creation procedures are standard practice and so there can be no wrong-doing. The university president eventually ruled that patents are not academic documents and so it was not possible for plagiarism to have occurred!!
Both the original scientific article (1998) and US patent (filed in 2000, issued in 2003) remain in the public domain. Contact me for their citations as they are not in the Errami database.
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I would like to quickly comment regarding Robert Taylor’s idea that publishing many times in different venues enhances dissemination of information.
I see no reason to publish the same data multiple times in different Journals. What is the harm, you may ask? Perhaps it depends on the field. However, in these days of meta-analysis of clinical data, it can be very misleading. If the same data on the same patients for the same drug is published under slightly different titles (and I have seen this happen), this skews the perception of the drug’s effectiveness.
Presenting the same data at a conference is a different matter, since the goal is to reach a wider audience using a different medium. In this case, authors usually do the right thing, and cite the publication for data sets during presentation. -
In my opinion, the Commentary ‘A tale of two citations’ (Nature 451, 397, 2008) sends a wrong signal itself. I dare to say that it promotes self-plagiarism, for Errami and Garner share the authorship list of the original research paper (Bioinformatics 24, 243, 2008). Although the Commentary acknowledges the original article “Déjà vu-A study of duplicate citations in Medline”, it encourages duplicate publications, with overlapping authors, of papers with sentences like “we identified ….”, “our results provide ….” etc. and obscure self-citation(s) somewhere in the text. To delineate what is really new in such papers will be a Herculean task for reviewers, editors, and readers alike. Ideally, the Commentary should have been written by a Nature staff or invited authors other than those of original research article. Most interestingly, Errami and Garner (Nature 451, 397, 2008) observe that “with few exceptions, the repeated publication of the same results by those who conducted the research is ethically questionable. It not only artificially inflates an author’s publication record …”. Mysteriously, they have not given any example of what they think should be exempted.
Regarding the issue of simultaneous submission, it is possible that some of them happen because of the temptation to publish quickly; considering the low acceptance rate. Duplicate publications may arise accidentally if the paper is accepted in two journals and the authors get further tempted. Presubmission enquiry may help here. Only a fraction of journals formally state that they welcome such enquiries. Those who do not should follow suit.
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