Mario Malički, researcher at the University of Split, in Croatia, presented a study last month at a symposium on peer review held in Chicago, in which he tracked the destination of duplicate articles whose findings had been published in more than one journal in a type of improper conduct that is intended to inflate an author’s productivity. Malički and his group cross-checked the registrations of 1,011 articles in the U.S. National Library of Medicine considered to be duplicates against records of investigations of duplication conducted by scientific journals. They uncovered a total of 175 papers whose findings were published at least twice. They also discovered that only 23 of these articles had been removed by the journals that had originally published them. The others are still in those magazines. “If these articles are cases of bad conduct, why not remove them?” Malički asked at the event, according to the blog Science Insider, from the journal Science. Elizabeth Wager, former chairperson of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), based in the United Kingdom, said she was surprised. “The editors of the scientific journals should be responsible for cleaning up this mess,” she stated.
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