A new study of biomedical journal articles found in a major database revealed thousands of instances of possible previously undiscovered plagiarism.

Harold Garner, biochemistry and internal medicine professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, led a project that used an advanced computer program to search the Medline journal and news database for suspicious duplication that could indicate plagiarism. The findings are available on the project's Web site.

The search program, called eTBLAST, has been available for several years and was designed to help researchers find prior research on specific topics. It compares entire works against one another and provides more accurate and relevant results than the standard keyword search used by popular Internet search engines, Garner said.

Garner said the massive amount of biomedical literature made available every year makes catching plagiarism unlikely.

"Until now, there has been no deterrent at all," he said. "This could greatly improve the biomedical literature in the next couple of years."

Garner said a journal retracted an article that the project identified as plagiarized - the first conclusive action taken following the project's completion.

Susan Schorn, UT Department of Rhetoric and Writing coordinator, said faculty members plagiarize for many of the same reasons that students do.

"The pressure that causes people to plagiarize, that doesn't stop after college," she said. "There's an incredible pressure to get stuff published and do original research."

The study found that between 1 and 2 percent of the publications in the Medline database contain some duplicated text. Most of the more than 71,000 suspicious pairs involved authors copying their own work, but the program found about 6,700 possible instances of duplicate articles by different authors. Garner's team has verified duplication in 75 of these cases and plans to individually investigate the rest.

Among the confirmed duplications is a study by Daniel Jones and two other researchers at UT Southwestern published in 2003. A nearly identical study was published in a Thai journal under the names of other authors four years later.

Jones, now an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, said there is more at stake than authors claiming credit for work they did not do. Physicians reading unreliable, plagiarized data compromises patient care.

"Bad information is worse than no information at all," he said. "You're making decisions affecting people's lives based on false data."

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