Scientists cloning more papers than ever

A new computer program reveals the questionable practice is on the rise, reports Roger Highfield

One scientific paper in every 100 has been cloned by researchers to improve their publication record in the endless quest to win more funding, according to a computerised trawl through millions of articles.

The study, which reveals that the duplicates have risen in incidence by almost four fold in the past three decades, comes from researchers who have used the new computer-based text-searching tool to compare multiple documents in a database for similarities, providing a more efficient method to carry out literature searches, as well as offering scientific journal editors a new tool to thwart questionable publication practices.

The "eTBLAST computer program" developed by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre researchers automatically - and quickly -is efficient at flagging publications that are highly similar, said Prof Harold "Skip" Garner, who developed the computer code along with his colleagues.

Another application of the program, discussed in the journals Bioinformatics and Nature, is to aid journal editors spot potentially plagiarised articles submitted for publication or those not sufficiently novel as to warrant another publication.

The program was used to analyse more than 62,000 abstracts from the past 12 years, randomly selected from Medline, one of the largest databases of biomedical research articles. They found that 0.04 percent of papers with no shared authors were highly similar and cases representing potential plagiarism.

The researchers also found that 1.35 percent of papers with shared authors were sufficiently similar to be considered duplicate publications of the same data, another questionable practice that makes a scientist look more productive.

In the second phase of the study, outlined in the journalNature, Prof Garner and Dr Mounir Errami refined their electronic search process so that is was thousands of times faster. An analysis of more than seven million abstracts turned up nearly 70,000 highly similar papers, and some "serial offenders".

Plagiarism may be the most extreme and nefarious form of unethical publication, Prof Garner said, but simultaneously submitting the same research results to multiple journals or repeated publication of the same data may also be considered unacceptable in many circumstances.

"Our estimates of the total number of duplicates would be between 200,000 to 250,000 in the Medline database, representing between 1.2 to 1.5 per cent. We believe that this estimate is a conservative one."

Three journal editors are already investigating the findings, says Prof Garner.