Estimating the prevalence of text overlap in biomedical conference abstracts.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Scientists communicate progress and exchange information via publication and presentation at scientific meetings. We previously showed that text similarity analysis applied to Medline can identify and quantify plagiarism and duplicate publications in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. In the present study, we applied the same analysis to a large sample of conference abstracts.

Methods

We downloaded 144,149 abstracts from 207 national and international meetings of 63 biomedical conferences. Pairwise comparisons were made using eTBLAST: a text similarity engine. A domain expert then reviewed random samples of highly similar abstracts (1500 total) to estimate the extent of text overlap and possible plagiarism.

Results

Our main findings indicate that the vast m

SUBMITTER: Kinney N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7849107 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature