A significant portion of biomedical research papers contain plagiarism, according to a report in this week's Nature.

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center used a new text-search program to scan papers and now estimate that the 17 million articles on Medline may contain 200,000 duplicates.

One of the nabbed authors is a "big shot" at "one of the most prestigious universities in the United States" who is now being investigated by a journal for plagiarism, author Mounir Errami told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

He and his colleagues have placed 70,000 abstracts they flagged as possible duplicates in a public database Deja vu for the community to review.