January 14, 2005

Evidence Suggests That Publisher's Reuse of Old Material Was More Extensive Than Initially Thought

By SCOTT CARLSON

Librarians and scholars were irked when they heard that Emerald, a major publisher of scholarly journals, had republished hundreds of articles in dozens of journals without noting that the material had already appeared elsewhere. New evidence suggests that the company's practice may go back further than initially thought.

Philip M. Davis, a Cornell University librarian who discovered the republishing, initially used Emerald's electronic databases to find more than 400 republished