Abstract
BackgroundScientists communicate progress and exchange information via publication and presentation at scientific meetings. We previously showed that text similarity analysis applied to Medline can identify and quantify plagiarism and duplicate publications in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. In the present study, we applied the same analysis to a large sample of conference abstracts.MethodsWe downloaded 144,149 abstracts from 207 national and international meetings of 63 biomedical conferences. Pairwise comparisons were made using eTBLAST: a text similarity engine. A domain expert then reviewed random samples of highly similar abstracts (1500 total) to estimate the extent of text overlap and possible plagiarism.ResultsOur main findings indicate that the vast majority of textual overlap occurred within the same meeting (2%) and between meetings of the same conference (3%), both of which were significantly higher than instances of plagiarism, which occurred in less than .5% of abstracts.ConclusionsThis analysis indicates that textual overlap in abstracts of papers presented at scientific meetings is one-tenth that of peer-reviewed publications, yet the plagiarism rate is approximately the same as previously measured in peer-reviewed publications. This latter finding underscores a need for monitoring scientific meeting submissions – as is now done when submitting manuscripts to peer-reviewed journals – to improve the integrity of scientific communications.
Highlights
Reliable dissemination of research is critical to the advancement of knowledge, the past 3 to 4 decades have witnessed growing concerns over the integrity of the scientific and scholarly record
Using text analytics we pioneered [31,32,33] and rigorously applied to Medline/Pubmed [34,35,36,37], we have shown that peer-reviewed publications contain 0.4% duplicate publications with different authors and 1.35% duplicates with the same authors [38]
Case study of the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting To gain a better understanding of text overlap in conference abstracts, we examined those abstracts presented at meetings of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)
Summary
Reliable dissemination of research is critical to the advancement of knowledge, the past 3 to 4 decades have witnessed growing concerns over the integrity of the scientific and scholarly record. A common research misbehavior that often rises to the level of research misconduct is plagiarism. Defined as passing off the work of others as one’s own [7], plagiarism can manifest itself in many forms. Authors and even journal editors seem to differ in terms of how much text overlap is acceptable, whether from one’s prior work (i.e., text recycling) or from others’ work (i.e., plagiarism) [8,9,10,11,12]. Scientists communicate progress and exchange information via publication and presentation at scientific meetings. We previously showed that text similarity analysis applied to Medline can identify and quantify plagiarism and duplicate publications in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. We applied the same analysis to a large sample of conference abstracts
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