Yury Chekhovich

About one in 20 papers recently published in Russian journals is an exact or near duplicate of an existing article, with some pieces reproduced as many as 27 times across different publications, according to a study. While the problem of plagiarism in Russian academic papers is well- known, having resulted in hundreds of retractions in recent years, an investigation reveals that a different form of text recycling. Self-plagiarism may also be rife.

According to a Journal of Informetrics paper that analysed 3.8 million scientific articles in Russian-language publications, about 3.9 percent of papers published between 2000 and 2019 had been published again in another outlet, usually by an author linked to the original article.

Overall, 70,406 papers were identified as duplicates — having a text overlap of at least two-thirds with another paper — of which more than 5,000 appeared three or more times. In several cases, papers were republished on more than 20 occasions, with one article appearing 27 times in different formats.

Yury Chekhovich, chief executive of the Moscow-based anti-plagiarism checking company Antiplagiat, who undertook the research with his colleague Andrey Khazov, told Times Higher Education that the analysis is important because it exposes the extent of a “very special kind of ethical violation”. “We believe that the number of detected cases found is unprecedented,” says Dr. Chekhovich, who explains that similar studies had identified far lower rates of duplication.

In some cases, authors republished papers from years earlier, but often the article is published in different outlets in the same year as a result of the “purposeful sending of new manuscripts to two or more journals,” says the study.

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