On the prevalence and scientific impact of duplicate publications in different scientific fields (1980‐2007)
| Pages | 179-190 |
| Date | 09 March 2010 |
| Published date | 09 March 2010 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00220411011023607 |
| Author | Vincent Larivière,Yves Gingras |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
On the prevalence and scientific
impact of duplicate publications
in different scientific fields
(1980-2007)
Vincent Larivie
`re and Yves Gingras
Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST),
Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST),
Universite
´du Que
´bec a
`Montre
´al, Montre
´al, Canada
Abstract
Purpose – The issue of duplicate publications has received a lot of attention in the medical literature,
but much less in the information science community. This paper aims to analyze the prevalence and
scientific impact of duplicate publications across all fields of research between 1980 and 2007.
Design/methodology/approach – The approach is a bibliometric analysis of duplicate papers
based on their metadata. Duplicate papers are defined as papers published in two different journals
having: the exact same title; the same first author; and the same number of cited references.
Findings – In all fields combined, the prevalence of duplicates is one out of 2,000 papers, but is
higher in the natural and medical sciences than in the social sciences and humanities. A very high
proportion (.85 percent) of these papers are published the same year or one year apart, which suggest
that most duplicate papers were submitted simultaneously. Furthermore, duplicate papers are
generally published in journals with impact factors below the average of their field and obtain lower
citations.
Originality/value – The paper provides clear evidence that the prevalence of duplicate papers is low
and, more importantly, that the scientific impact of such papers is below average.
Keywords Ethics, Medicalsciences, Intellectual property,Publications, Information science
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
For obvious reasons of integrity and ethics in scientific publishing, the issue of
duplicate publications has received a lot of attention, particularly in the medical
literature. As Errami and Garner (2008) state, repeated publication of the same results,
“not only artificially inflates an author’s publication record but places an undue burden
on journal editors and reviewers, and is expressly forbidden by most journal copyright
rules” (p. 398). Duplicate publications can also affect the reliability of meta-analyses, as
the same dataset might be counted more than once (Gurevitch and Hedges, 1999;
Tramer et al., 1997; Wood, 2008). Finally it is also in contradiction with Merton’s norm
of originality (Merton, 1973).
In order to avoid such publication behavior, the New England Journal of Medicine
adopted, as early as 1969, a publication policy known as the Ingelfinger rule (Angell
and Kassirer, 1991; Ingelfinger, 1969), which states that journals would only consider
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
The authors wish to thank Lorie Kloda, Jean Lebel, Benoit Macaluso as well as the anonymous
referees for their useful comments and suggestions.
On the prevalence
of duplicate
publications
179
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 66 No. 2, 2010
pp. 179-190
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/00220411011023607
To continue reading
Request your trial