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Published: 02/01/08
New Tool for Detecting Plagiarism by College Faculty
From "Plagiarism and Other Sins Seem Rife in Science Journals, a Digital Sleuth Finds" by: Lila Guterman, Chronicle of Higher Education
A tool called eTBLAST, originally developed to allow scientists to scan medical literature available online to find work related to their own, has been used to detect possible plagiarism, not by students but by research faculty. The online text-search program scans biomedical abstracts to find articles that appear similar to published works, according to a report published in Nature by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The tool has identified approximately 70,000 suspicious abstracts on Medline, the online database of abstracts for biomedical journals. The investigators examined 2,600 of these manually and found 73 cases of what appears to be outright plagiarism. Much more prevalent were potential instances of double publishing, in which a researcher publishes identical papers in different journals. This practice, in addition to posing ethical violations and distorting research projects, can be harmful to patients, making it seem that more patients have been tested than actually have and providing a false sense of safety for a drug.

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