It was initially developed by Alexander Pertsemlidis and Harold “Skip” Garner in 2005 at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
It compared a user’s natural-text query with target databases utilizing a hybrid-search algorithm.
The text-similarity engine studied duplicate publications and potential plagiarism in biomedical literature.
eTBLAST received thousands of random samples of Medline abstracts for a large-scale study.
The work revealed several trends including an increasing rate of duplication in the biomedical literature, according to prominent scientific journals Bioinformatics,[2]Anaesthesia and Intensive Care,[3] Clinical Chemistry,[4] Urologic oncology,[5] Nature,[6] and Science.