Deja vu: a database of highly similar citations in the scientific literature

Abstract

In the scientific research community, plagiarism and covert multiple publications of the same data are considered unacceptable because they undermine the public confidence in the scientific integrity. Yet, little has been done to help authors and editors to identify highly similar citations, which sometimes may represent cases of unethical duplication. For this reason, we have made available Déjà vu, a publicly available database of highly similar Medline citations identified by the text similarity search engine eTBLAST. Following manual verification, highly similar citation pairs are classified into various categories ranging from duplicates with different authors to sanctioned duplicates. Déjà vu records also contain user-provided commentary and supporting information to substantiate each document's categorization. Déjà vu and eTBLAST are available to authors, editors, reviewers, ethicists and sociologists to study, intercept, annotate and deter questionable publication practices. These tools are part of a sustained effort to enhance the quality of Medline as 'the' biomedical corpus. The Déjà vu database is freely accessible at http://spore.swmed.edu/dejavu. The tool eTBLAST is also freely available at http://etblast.org.

Figure 1.

The Déjà vu citation presentation output. (A) Browsing interface for database content. (B) Query box to search duplicate records by author names, title, abstract, year of publication and comment words. (C) List of records in Déjà vu including PMIDs, author names, publication date and links to Medline citations and free full text when available. (D) Category filters to browse records in a particular category. (E) Side-by-side view of a duplicate record highlighting overlapping keywords in blue. (F) Miscellaneous information for each article involved.