Scientists recently published their findings of plagiarism and the use of duplicate publication in journal manuscripts and scientific conferences in the research paper, “Estimating the prevalence of text overlap in biomedical conference abstracts.” Plagiarism and duplicate publication are often common forms of misconduct when presenting research, whether from a researcher’s prior work (i.e., text recycling) or from others’ work. Sometimes, authors and even journal editors have disagreements on the acceptable amount of text overlap used.
“Scientists have long been aware of ethical problems in journal manuscripts - plagiarism and duplicate publication. We show that the same issues exist at scientific meetings. This can greatly affect research progress and scientific exchange. Conference organizers should take steps to prevent this, as was done previously by journal publishers,” said Dr. Harold Garner.
The research findings show that the percentage of researchers using text overlap was significantly higher than the misconduct of plagiarism. “Scientific progress depends on accurate and reliable information exchange. Dissemination of research findings represents the seed for future scientific discoveries and validation for existing observations and theories.”