Comparison of the patterns of duplicate articles between KoreaMed and PubMed journals published from 2004 to 2009 according to the categories of duplicate publications

Abstract

This study compared the patterns of duplicate articles between KoreaMed and PubMed journals based on a division of duplicate publications into the 4 categories of ‘copy,’ ‘salami’ (fragmentation), ‘imalas’ (disaggregation), and ‘others,’ as well as in terms of the 11 subcategories suggested by Bae et al., which further elaborate on those 4 main categories. We hypothesized that these 2 groups of articles would show different patterns of duplication. Duplicate publications were identified in a random sample of 5% of the articles from the KoreaMed database published between 2004 and 2009, while all articles with the publication type of ‘duplicate publication’ were selected from PubMed over the same period. The selected articles were classified based on the 4 categories and 11 subcategories of duplicate publications, and the data from the 2 groups were compared. A total of 108 articles were selected from KoreaMed and 45 articles were obtained from PubMed. The category of copy was the most common in both databases. The next most frequent pattern was imalas (disaggregation). Pattern of duplicate publication between 2 databases showed no correlation (P = 0.8754). Although the 108 articles from KoreaMed were allocated to all 11 Bae et al.’s subcategories, those from PubMed were allocated to only 8. The above results showed that the articles in the 2 databases had different patterns of duplication, as defined in terms of the 11 subcategories. The use of these 11 subcategories will help journal editors to develop an appropriate framework for considering a variety of duplication types.

Keywords

• factual databases
• korea
• medical writing
• publications
• pubmed