UT Southwestern researcher creates computer-based report comparison tool

by PegNews wire

Dr. Harold “Skip” Garner may be smiling, but that doesn't mean he isn't trying to ferret out your little report-duplication scam, you report-duplicating scam-bag.

It's called eTBLAST, and it's the text-comparing brainchild of Dr. Harold (Skip to his friends) Garner, professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. What it does (which apparently has nothing to do with what it's named - anyone?) is analyze large numbers of scientific article abstracts with the goal of identifying those that are strikingly similar.

While one reason for wanting to isolate these near-clones would be to identify cases of plagiarism (and simultaneous duplicate publication in multiple journals, another ethically questionable practice), its usefulness extends into the area of those preparing to publish who want to identify possible collaborators working in the same field.

Dr. Spock discovers an unfortunate side-effect of using the eBLAST algorithm.

Says Dr. Garner: "Our objective in this research is to make a significant impact on how scientific publications may be handled in the future. As it becomes more widely known that there are tools such as eTBLAST available, and that journal editors and others can use it to look at papers during the submission process, we hope to see the numbers of potentially unethical duplications diminish considerably.”

Dr. Garner had the assistance of Dr. Mounir Errami, an instructor in internal medicine, along with computer programmer Justin Hicks, post-doc researcher Dr. Wayne Fisher, network analyst David Trusty and staffer Tara Long. A fellow researcher at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation - Dr. Jonathan Wren - also participated.

posted by JM