A new study based on text comparison demonstrated that an enormous percentage of the scientific medicine texts were almost identical. This brings into attention the fact that there are too many scientific publications for this plagiarism to be spotted. The consequences of this discovery are still to be weighed.

 

Harold R. Garner (also called "Skip") is a PhD professor of biochemistry and Internal Medicine from the Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas in Dallas. He is focused on a large number of various projects, among which the “Data mining (grammar induction) on terabyte-sized biomedical text datasets, and Duplicate article detection” study occupies an important place.

The concept of this project relies on the assiduous search for plagiarized texts within the medical literature, by means of a text-matching computer program, and its results are puzzling. There were 181 works the text of which was identical on an average proportion of 85%. About 25% of these were almost 100% the same. This proves just how numerous the scientific publications are, be them printed, online or otherwise.

They are so many that the plagiarism phenomenon is rarely spotted by persons who got to read the same material in other places. But another aspect discovered by the research was the fact that this didn't affect the original authors too much, since, more than often, the copies were reiterated in little known publications.
 

Still, one might wonder whether this was so bad, in fact, if you look at the big picture, considering that this only helps spread the knowledge contained in the genuine work. While it's true that most of the plagiarizers don't also share the name of the original authors, thus stripping them of the deserved credits, a more thorough search by the readers could reveal the forgery. As a final argument, it can be said that the names are usually quickly forgotten, while the most important discoveries are still remembered one way or the other, sometimes even in the form of an item that we use on a regular basis. Vivid example: could you name the inventor of, say, the pencil, without searching the Internet?