Plagiarism: The Plague of Publishing

Abstract

Within the last 12 months, IFT peer reviewed journals have had to deal with 3 instances of manuscripts that contained inappropriately or uncited materials from previously published, copyrighted articles. The fact that this has hit our journals is not unusual since many journals are increasingly dealing with these types of instances. Note that I am intentionally not calling these instances plagiarism because a charge of plagiarism is very serious and in our case a charge of plagiarism was not lodged nor founded. These occurrences, however, did cause Amanda Ferguson, our Manager of Peer-Reviewed Publications, to inquire details about software programs that are increasingly being used to detect potential plagiarism. In discussions with personnel at the spring ScholarOne User Conference, she found that ScholarOne Manuscripts had a new tool available for our use: iThenticate, a software program that checks the manuscript against those in the CrossCheck database. An initiative by CrossRef, CrossCheck includes relevant full-text published literature and internet sites. As a policy we have begun to sporadically check manuscripts using iThenticate. iThenticate produces a report that provides a numerical score on similarity of words (including bibliography) in already published works. It is then up to the Scientific Editor to decipher if indeed plagiarism has occurred. We are working with the Scientific Editors of our journals to ensure that they properly interpret the reports generated by the software. In general, plagiarism has occurred in the publishing world most frequently in review papers. Given access to papers through the internet, the challenges and complexity of tracking uncited materials has increased. “Cut and paste” manuscripts can be easily generated and nearly as easily overlooked in the review process. We are committed to making IFT's peer- reviewed journals the standard of authenticity and quality. We think using iThenticate will assist not only to curb plagiarism in our journals but also serve as a deterrent by letting authors know we are using the software.