Identifying Duplicate Publications: Primum non Nocere

Abstract

Errami and Garner published in the January 24, 2008, issue of Nature an article entitled, “A Tale of Two Citations,” that deals with the timely subject of publication of duplicate reports(1). With the increase in the number of scientific journals and the ongoing pressure to publish in them, inappropriate and unethical practices, such as plagiarism, unauthorized “cosubmission” of a paper to 2 or more journals simultaneously, and duplication of a previous report, may also be on the rise. The authors of the Nature Commentary focused on 2 important reports to document this problem(2)(3). The first was from a large study that used text-matching software to mine 280 000 entries in arXiv, an open-access database for publications in mathematics, physics, biology, statistics, and computer science(2). Of the examined articles, 0.2% of them were suspected of plagiarism, and 10.5% were suspected of being a duplicate publication by the same authors. The second study was from an anonymous survey of 3247 American biomedical researchers(3). In this survey, 1.4% of the researchers admitted to the act of plagiarism, and 4.7% confessed to repeated publication of the same results. With more than 17 million citations in the Medline …