Harold “Skip” Garner has worn many hats over the course of his career, including plasma physicist, biologist, and administrator. One of his interests is plagiarism and duplication the scientific literature, and he and colleagues developed a tool called eTBLAST that compares text passages to what has already been published to flag potential overlap.
For some disciplines, the conference can be the main, or at least an important, mechanism to distribute new theories and approaches. It is therefore essential that the peer review/editorial process the event checks for all forms of plagiarism.
Retraction Watch (RW): You used a “text similarity engine” called eTBLAST. What is eTBLAST, and what does it do?
Howard Garner (HG): eTBLAST is a search engine that quantifies the amount of similarity between a text query and a given collection of text being searched; in this case Medline abstracts or collections of abstracts. It works by submitting, for example, a paragraph, and then it compares that to other paragraphs, for example, abstracts. eTBLAST, created by Heliotext, LLC, is available at Etblast.org, for searching Medline/PubMed for free. It has thousands of users a day, scientists use it to find references and collaborators, patent attorneys use it to find Intellectual Property information, and those journals that cannot afford paid services use it to check submitted abstracts for possible ethical violations.
