Nature reports on the efforts of two investigators at UT Southwestern to get a better idea of how many papers in MEDLINE are “recycled” or plagiarized. The methodology is a little complicated but the most precise guess is that some 200,000 of the 8 million or so items with abstracts show signs of “creative recycling” or unacknowledged borrowing. The authors also address the matter of simultaneous submission of the same article to several journals. Using T-blast, the name of the algorithm the researchers created for the study, several different data runs were conducted on the database. Speculating on the apparent increase in phonus bolonus publications brings the authors to suggest several reasons for the faux publication boomlet: Publish or perish, problems in translation, simple opportunity and several others.
Their study may indicate directions for more research into the bibliometrics of this aspect of publication.
Recycling