A tale of two citations

Are scientists publishing more duplicate papers? An automated search of seven million biomedical abstracts suggests that they are, report Mounir Errami and Harold Garner. A literature trawl using the text-similarity search engine eTBLAST ( http://tinyurl.com/2ex4ey ) has uncovered a worrying trend: duplication, co-submission and plagiarism are on the increase. Mounir Errami and Harold Garner estimate the extent of the problem, and map out techniques that could be used to clean up our collective act. Chief among them, the convergence of journals' electronic submission systems with the new computational tools being developed to detect duplications.