December 3, 2004

Librarian Finds Publisher's Journals Ran Identical Articles Without Notice

By SCOTT CARLSON

A librarian at Cornell University has discovered that a major scholarly-journal company, Emerald, has often published the same article in multiple journals without noting that the material had already appeared elsewhere.

"I found journals that were complete copies of one another," says Philip M. Davis, a life-sciences librarian at Cornell.

He found that Emerald, a British company that publishes journals on management-and-information science, had republished 409 articles in 67