Special ArticlesRedundant surgical publications: Tip of the iceberg?*,**
Section snippets
Methods
Original articles (excluding review articles, invited contributions, editorials, extended abstracts, abstracts, letters, and published abstracts of congress-proceedings) published during 1998 in Surgery, The British Journal of Surgery, and Archives of Surgery were searched by using the on-line search engine PUBMED on the Internet (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/medline.html).
Each original article was searched to identify redundant articles by combining the names of the first, second, and
Results
A total of 660 original papers from the 3 journals were screened by using the aforementioned criteria. We identified 92 index articles (14%) leading to suspected papers representing some form of a redundant publication (Table III).The countries of origin of the index papers are listed in Table III, with the United States of America (n = 31), United Kingdom (n = 11), and Japan (n = 11) leading the list.
The 660 screened papers led to 147 suspected papers. On the average, the 3 journals combined
Discussion
In the absence of clear and uniformly accepted definitions of what is a redundant publication, the results of this study—using our own definitions—are to be considered preliminary. To maximize objectivity, we excluded from the analysis any published material that was solicited or interpreted as for educational redistribution (such as editorials, leading articles, review articles, or proceedings of a congress). Focusing thus only on original publications, our study shows that a significant
Conclusion
This study shows that the incidence of redundant or frankly duplicate publishing is higher than is generally appreciated, with about 1 in every 6 original articles published in leading surgical journals potentially representing some form of redundancy. The consequent compromise of the quality of surgical publications should behoove editors, reviewers, writers, and readers to cooperate in creating effective filter mechanisms to screen for and attempt to eliminate redundant publications.
Acknowledgements
We thank Asher Hirshberg, MD, for his invaluable input.
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Cited by (0)
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Reprint requests: Moshe Schein, MD, Department of Surgery, New York Methodist Hospital, 516 Sixth St, Brooklyn, NY 11215.
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Surgery 2001;129:655-61.