Duplicate publications: redundancy in plastic surgery literature

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Summary

The practice of duplicate publication has been condemned widely in the scientific community and several studies have been conducted to establish the level of the problem in various surgical fields.

A retrospective review of original articles from the British Journal of Plastic Surgery and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery during 2000 was conducted, using Medline (PubMed). A total of 431 abstracts were screened, from which 27 index articles related to 33 ‘suspected redundant’ publications. Further evaluation was carried out by comparing the full text versions of these articles and assigning a grade of non-dual, dual, potentially dual and ‘salami-slicing’. Only four suspect articles were confirmed as having some degree of redundancy, and these related to three index articles (3/431, <1%). The incidence of duplication in plastic surgery literature seems to be much lower compared to other surgical specialties, providing reassurance for reviewers, editors and readers of these journals.

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Methods

Original articles published during 2000 in the British Journal of Plastic Surgery (BJPS) and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (PRS) were searched using the on-line search engine PubMed on the internet (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/medline.html). Review articles, invited contributions, editorials, case reports, CME articles and letters were excluded. Some articles were published in categories that do not fit neatly into any of the above. For the purposes of this study, any such article

Results

A total of 431 abstracts from BJPS and PRS published in 2000 were screened (Table 2). Of the 33 articles identified as ‘suspected redundant’ publications, 21 were deemed to be non-duplicate when the full text versions were compared with the index article; eight could not be graded because they were published in a foreign language journal and four were confirmed as having a degree of redundancy (Table 3). The 33 suspected articles related to 27 index articles, and the four redundant publications

Discussion

Since the study of redundancy in general surgery literature,2 several studies have identified and assessed the scope of this problem within other surgical specialties. One in 13 (7.6%) of publications in the orthopaedic literature was found to have some degree of redundancy,7 8.5% of articles in otolaryngology literature, 1.4% of publications in ophthalmology and 2% of hand surgery publications were identified as duplicate.8, 9, 10 In this study, less than 1% of publications in two leading

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Work to be presented at BAPS Summer Scientific Meeting 2006.

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