Potential Predictibility of References in the Identification of Derivative Articles from Doctoral Theses

Abstract

This paper reports the results obtained on the predictability of references for the identification of derivative articles from doctoral theses, based on a sample of 68 medical theses and 334 articles published by the same theses authors. The study performs an analysis of the common references shared by theses and articles through a text similarity approach. A textual similarity comparison is carried out with the discursive sections of articles (Introduction, Methodology, Results and Discussion) based on the full-text of theses and articles. The results suggest that the Reference section has a high sensitivity to detect true positives cases and a low specificity to identify negative cases, corresponding to a high recall a low precision in the detection of derivative articles.