Medical Theses and Derivative Articles: Dissemination Of Contents and Publication Patterns
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Doctoral theses are an important source of publication in universities, although little research has been carried out on the publications resulting from theses, on so-called derivative articles. This study investigates how derivative articles can be identified through a text analysis based on the full-text of a set of medical theses and the full-text of articles, with which they shared authorship. The text similarity analysis methodology applied consisted in exploiting the full-text articles according to organization of scientific discourse (IMRaD) using the TurnItIn plagiarism tool. The study found that the text similarity rate in the Discussion section can be used to discriminate derivative articles from non-derivative articles. Additional findings were: the first position of the thesis's author dominated in 85 derivative articles, the participation of supervisors as coauthors occurred in 100 author was 42 in derivative articles versus 6.4 coauthors, as average, in non-derivative articles and the time differential regarding the year of thesis completion showed that 87.5 year of thesis completion.
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