Comments on: The Impact Factor’s Matthew Effect

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:39:08 +0000

See key comments made by Pierre at orgtheory.net

By: paul

paul — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:16:34 +0000

37, Paul, I think your point (1) is valid. I think it’s not uncommon to republish articles in the physical sciences in English translation when the original article was in Russian, German or French. Perhaps some of these cases would fail the “duplicates” test as the titles would appear to be different, although many non-English language journals now provide a title and abstract in English.

I was once asked to review a paper which was a borderline case of self-plagiarism, and certainly contained no new material of any merit. A very quick search for the authors’ names and the topic returned a list of suspiciously similar articles, one of which was very similar. My hunch is that quite a lot of people try to get away with this sort of thing, but the peer review process is probably fairly good at catching them.

By: Paul Orwin

Paul Orwin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:32:46 +0000

From a quick look at the DejaVu site, it seems there are several plausible scenarios that result in duplicate publications, some conceivably nefarious (CV padding, etc), most basically innocent.
1) Publish in two different languages – Chinese then English, or vice versa, for example. I can see how a person from China might wish to do this. Same goes obviously for any other linguistic pair. I imagine that this might be a bad thing to do in some people’s minds, but I’m not sure I see it. It might be a violation of journal policies in some cases, though.
2) Republish a review article in an additional venue. Presumably to disseminate it to a wider audience. For example, a review on the pharmacokinetics of some drug within an addict population might be useful to people in several disciplines, who might not read the same journals. Others can feel free to come up with their own examples.
3) Joint publication of interdisciplinary work – two journals agree for similar reasons to those in (2) to jointly publish a work. There was a paper on medical ethics in the list that was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics and the Journal of Medical Education. That seems like an appropriate duplication, since readers of both journals might be interested in the article (I didn’t read it, but it was something about euthanasia).

In the end, this seems like a rather benign phenomenon, mostly explained by innocent practices, and revealed by the newfound ability to compare massive numbers of journal articles using search and comparison algorithms.

By: andrewm

andrewm — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:24:44 +0000

Apparently the Web of Science has about 42 million unique records, so it seems that Lariviere & Gingras have found a duplication rate of approximately 1 in 10,000 papers. This accords much more closely with my own experience (i.e. one colleague encountering one case of simultaneous submission in ~25 years) than the numbers up-thread.

The linked article at #32, with a ~1% duplication rate on a tighter criterion, makes you wonder about the folk indexed by PubMed…

By: Fr.

Fr. — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:33:28 +0000

Some discussion and amazement about the results on Friendfeed.

By: Doormat

Doormat — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:15:07 +0000

This is quite fascinating! Following eudoxis's link at #32, you can find this website: Dejavu Website. It's an automated text search, but with manual verification. If you click on some of the entries, you'll find automated matches which don't, to a human eye, look like duplicates, but also some verified things which are definately duplicates! I picked one example where I have access to the journal, and the articles are the same, pretty much. I didn't want to post the links here, but what do people think? Anyway, these are published in the same journal, a couple of months apart, with the same "recieved" and "accepted" dates. But one looks a bit more polished than the other. I do wonder, in this case, if the journal just accidentally published the first draft, and then made up by publishing the correct version? Of course, this isn't explained! Ah, but I've just found another example where the same thing has happened, but here the journal has also issued an errata explaining the mistake: see Behavioural Brain Research Volume 157, Issue 2, 28 February 2005, Page 379 (You'll need some sort of Science Direct access). But other examples are published in different journals (I haven't found one yet where I could access both text versions).

By: Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:29:20 +0000

I’m pretty sure Michael Dummett has some papers that count as “duplicates” in this sense. That is, I’m pretty sure there are two papers with the same (only) author, the same title (“Truth”) and the same citation list (namely, nothing). Of course, these aren’t actually duplicates – his 1956 (I think that’s right) paper is a pretty important one, while the other one (or maybe two) titled just “Truth” isn’t as much.

Of course, Dummett is a special case, both in the lack of citations, and the repeat of titles.

By: Zamfir

Zamfir — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:56:01 +0000

Lemuel, it’s not obviously more harmful than any alternatives, but it is an example of a step in a path dependency problem where being well-regarded makes it easier to become even better regarded.

The general assumption in a lot of academic funding etc. is that having done important work in the past makes you more likely to do so in the future, and experience seems agree that this is true.

The Matthew effect suggest that part of this is an illusion, because people regard your work as more important if you did important work in the past.

By: eudoxis

eudoxis — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:31:39 +0000

On the topic of duplicate publications.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7177/full/451397a.html

There was much discussion about this last year. I appears that duplicate publications comprise about 1% of total, mostly involve low impact publications, and, presently, don’t seem to be on the increase. Open access, new rules for submitting total text to PubMed, for example, and better search algorithms seem to be keeping this phenomenon in check.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:07:58 +0000

I have to admit, I don’t understand what is at all surprising or troubling about this. The alternative to the “Matthew effect” would be a world where journals added no value. If the point of journals is precisely to act as a filter, isn’t the fact that papers in better-known journals are more widely read a sign that the system is working exactly as it’s supposed to?

By: Conrad

Conrad — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:50:59 +0000

Like doormat @ 22, I would like more information about the search method for identifying duplicates along these categories. I found another paper by the authors that breaks the duplicates down by field. Apparently they found a couple hundred social science duplicates over the last couple of decades. I would like some examples of these duplicates.

I can imagine someone might think they could get away with padding their CV by publishing the same article with different titles but I don’t see why they would make their sin obvious by repeating the same title in both instances.

Should the authors of this paper have an obligation to disclose their methodology so their results can be duplicated and evaluated? I think so.

By: Fr.

Fr. — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:44:03 +0000

I want to see the duplicates data; especially for the social sciences.

By: Salient

Salient — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:08:25 +0000

I am wondering if they controlled for whether or not the paper was published in the high-impact journal first (and I’d like to know what percentage of the papers were first published in the high-impact journal and then the low-impact journal).

By: onymous

onymous — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:35:29 +0000

I’m not convinced the CV argument holds. For one, they could just list things out of order and hope no one notices identical titles. Also, I’ve been told that in some countries, advancement in academia and awarding of grants is determined almost entirely by number of publications; it could be that they aren’t looking too closely at the details.

By: kid bitzer

kid bitzer — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:19:22 +0000

i’m very reassured by the “tossed out on your butt” comments.

though this then makes satan mayo’s question in 15 more pressing:
why would an author even want to do this, if they cannot enjoy the spoils of their dishonesty via a padded cv?

and it raises a further research avenue:

look at the cvs of the authors of the 4532 papers in question, and see which one they cited in their own cvs!