Plagiarism

Does anyone have suggestions for editors  to make sure that articles are free from plagiarism?

If an editor detects plagiarism, what action should he or she take? Is there any way to rate it?

SM Kadri
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My university uses a subscription plagiarism detector called Turn-it-in. (http://turnitin.com/static/index.html) You feed a student's paper into the Web site and get back a report showing all instances where a passage is also on the Internet or in any previous report submitted by a Turn-it-in subscriber. All references return as "plagiarism" because they are obviously on the Internet, but it does pick up genuine plagiarism. Yesterday, I had to deal with a Masters degree student’s term paper that returned a score of 64% plagiarism and had 16 passages that were shown to be from a paper submitted to a unit of study at another Australian university that also uses the system. After questioning the student, he admitted it was his wife's paper (which he candidly confessed he had written for her...!) He had no expectation that we would be able to find this material.

Simon Chapman
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I question whether there is an increase in plagiarism in the medical literature. From what I have heard, there is a real problem of students buying term papers on the Web, but does this phenomenon extend to publishing in peer-reviewed journals? Is there hard data supporting this assertion? True, it's a little easier to "cut and paste" as opposed to having to hand copy out of an existing document, but as Simon points out, the ease by which you can get caught has risen dramatically and the stakes are so high. Scientific research has gotten so narrow and specialized and people in the field are very knowledgeable of the literature. It just seems one would be taking a real risk with the potential of destroying one’s career even without the software that is available.

In 12 years as an editor, I have had to deal with only one instance of plagiarism, which was caught by the original author.

David J. Solomon
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I agree that we really don't know whether there is more plagiarism now than before; however, I think you're very fortunate to have dealt with only one case in twelve years. I'm envious and surprised. Recently, in the two years I spent copyediting for a very well-indexed medical journal going through a bad patch when I signed on, I and my fellow copyeditor, between us, saw three or four articles with plagiarism per issue (out of about 12 to 14 articles per issue). And those were just the ones that reached us copyeditors.

The range of seriousness varied. It went from cut-paste writing of blocks of two or three sentences here and there in the Introductions and Discussions all the way to the (less frequent) plagiarism of very large blocks. Sometimes the borrowings were incoherently pasted—a clue to "plagiarism for syntax's sake." Other times, the plagiarism was large and certainly deliberate; this last was quite unusual, however.

Since the journal wasn't part of a well-equipped Anglophone university system or supported by a publisher interested in a plagiarism detection system, we did it the hard way—copying suspected sentences into Google if we suspected plagiarism for any reason (incoherent cutting and pasting or unexpected perfection of language mixed with anomalous language). Sometimes we found it purely by accident, while researching a term for our own information while copyediting.

The solutions applied depended on the seriousness and the nature of the prose problems created. They included the following: 1) re-write for the author to smooth out the choppy text created by cutting and pasting if the chunks were short—noting frankly for the author the reason for such rewriting; 2) return the manuscript to the author for re-writing, after marking some instances of plagiarized text found and asking the author to identify and rewrite any other such blocks of copied text we might not have found yet;  and 3) in one case asking the author to either re-write a review or ask a book publisher for permission to re-publish. (The author decided to pay the publisher's high price and permission was duly noted in a footnote.)

The second solution was the most satisfactory and worked well. I usually rewrote one instance of plagiarism to give the author an example of what we needed. Some very honest authors wrote and thanked us for pointing it out and went on to independently rectify cut-paste writing we hadn't yet detected; their papers contained grammatical errors in those sections, but they were sometimes more coherent after paraphrasing than they had been before, when they had fewer errors. However, it was a time consuming process, publication was often delayed, and it amounted to extra, unpaid work.

It's not the same in all peripheral journals. For a different journal, at the wordface level, I saw plagiarism less often (four cases in five years). In one case, the author declined to cooperate in the re-writing and he withdrew the paper. (I suspected invented data, but couldn't prove it.) In another case, the plagiarism was extensive and the paper was de-accepted with no invitation to rewrite—it was a review article, full of copied abstracts.

The editors always supported the copyeditors in this and acted appropriately in my opinion, but it was quite tiring for us. It was frustrating that these were all papers that had been accepted by peer reviewers and an editorial board, who seemed oblivious to the textual clues that are red flags for plagiarism. The prevalence of plagiarism after two years at the journal that received so much of it was just as high as it was at the beginning.

Mary Ellen Kerans
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I recently caught an abstract submitted for presentation at an international meeting that was nearly verbatim the abstract of a paper I had published in a peer-reviewed journal the year before—a very few words had been changed, otherwise identical.

The authors, from a developing non-democratic nation, likely needed to get an abstract accepted for presentation at the meeting to be funded and permitted to attend. The efforts of myself, the conference leaders, and the editors of the journal that printed the conference abstracts to reach the authors or anybody in authority at their institution have been unsuccessful.

I realize this is anecdote and not data, but I think in this electronic age, it is probably easier for folks to obtain material to plagiarize. I greatly doubt that these authors would have obtained the abstract if the article had not been available on the Internet.

David C Cone

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Thanks for the feedback. It has gotten me a little concerned. We don't specifically look for it and cannot afford the software, as we are an open access journal run mainly on volunteer effort, but I will try to be more vigilant.

I guess I am a little surprised and disappointed in the journals that are not taking it more seriously. I cannot imagine just sending the manuscript back to the author and telling them to fix it. Plagiarism is a serious form of scientific misconduct. I understand especially for authors from developing countries it may be ignorance of what is appropriate, but otherwise it should be addressed more harshly than just asking for a rewrite.

Dave Solomon
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Indeed the journals take plagiarism seriously. Probably the best available recommendation to face plagiarism can be found on COPE's (Committee on Publication Ethics) Web site (http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/flow-charts).

Farrokh Habibzadeh
Secretary, World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)
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Ah, plagiarism, my favorite topic ....

There is some evidence that some academically dishonest acts by students have increased, but I am not aware of any study that has specifically attempted to determine whether plagiarism within the biomedical literature, or within any other professional area, has increased. Nevertheless, like many of you, I am convinced that plagiarism has, indeed, risen in the professional literature and that the copy-paste capabilities of word processing and the relatively easy access of  literature via the Internet have greatly facilitated these behaviors. Other important variables are the ever-increasing pressure to publish and, more importantly I think, the growing number of non English-speaking scientists facing these pressures, who lack the proper writing skills to generate prose of professional journal quality.

That some of us find more plagiarism than others may be more a function of what we consider plagiarism. An interesting study about the use of plagiarism detection software amongst US institutions of higher learning that is yet to be published (see http://www.beckyfiedler.com/pdfs/deanssurveyresults.pdf for a summary; SM Kadri especially and interested others should read this!), the authors found some interesting discrepancies in how respondents defined plagiarism. Specifically, the finding that 31% of the respondents (deans and others) felt that using "text from another source, with some form of attribution, but without marking it as a quote" is not plagiarism is alarming to me. My sense is, and I have no data to back the following claim, that many writers—and perhaps some editors—in the biomedical disciplines adhere to this type of definition. Well, of course, if you are like me, who subscribes to 'tighter' definition of plagiarism and finds this transgression to be as offensive as I do (particularly when it comes from authors with a 'native' command of the language), then as the Japanese proverb goes: "When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," and you'll find many instances of plagiarism.

Miguel Roig
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With regard to my post above, a thoughtful list member indicated to me privately that I had likely misidentified the authorship of the proverb. Not only that, it seems that the wording I used was not quite right either. Several Internet sites list the proverb as follows "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail" and list fellow psychologist, Abraham Maslow, as the author.

My error illustrates a common phenomenon known as 'source misattribution'; a memory mechanism that may be responsible for some/many instances of unconscious plagiarism (of ideas). For example, when we hear an original idea from another source we may later mistakenly come to believe that we were the actual source of the idea and subsequently claim authorship of it. Fortunately for me, my error was not to claim authorship of the proverb, but to incorrectly attribute it to someone else. Sorry.

Miguel Roig
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I have a query about plagiarism. Is there soft ware or any other method to check it?  Is there an acceptable type of plagiarism?

SM Kadri
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There is some software for that purpose. Turn-it-in and iThenticate are used in some universities. FreeStyler and CrossCheck are used by some publishers. You can also use eTblast (http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/etblast.shtml) to find similar texts. But a handy tool is Google. Copy thesuspicious phrases in the search box and find the similar phrases. (We have used that at our office many times and have found many plagiarized texts!)

Regarding the second part of your question: There is no acceptable plagiarism. It is not acceptable in any form, but paraphrasing is acceptable. It means that the author should read the main text and write what he/she can understand in his/her own words while referring the phrase to the main author (by reference number). I hope this helps.

Behrooz Astaneh
Deputy Editor, Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences
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One other option that everyone should be aware of is Lou Bloomfield's free plagiarism program, WCopyfind available at http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/. It is very useful IF you already have the sources of the plagiarized material and the target document that contains the suspected plagiarism. The program allows you to specify what criterion you wish to use to determine whether material was plagiarized (6-word strings, 10-word strings, etc.), will highlight the plagiarized text, will give you a couple measures of plagiarism, and is relatively easy to use.

Bloomfield is the physicist from the University of Virginia who caught over 100 students plagiarizing his assignment back in 2001. (Here is a short article on that case, http://archives.cnn.com/2002/EDUCATION/11/26/uva.plagiarism.ap/index.html.) He developed the program for that specific purpose, has updated it a number of times, and others have since used it in their research on plagiarism (see, for example, Bilic-Zulle, L. Frkovic, V. Turk, T. Azman, J. & Petrovecki, M. (2005). Prevalence of plagiarism among medical students. Croatian Medical  Journal. 46(1):126-31 available at http://www.cmj.hr/2005/46/1/15726686.pdf).

Miguel Roig
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An excellent tool to check plagiarism is available at http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/etblast.shtml

Domingo Braile
Editor, RBCCV/BJCVS