Prevalence of Plagiarism in Recent Submissions to the Croatian Medical Journal

Abstract

To assess the prevalence of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted for publication in the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ). All manuscripts submitted in 2009-2010 were analyzed using plagiarism detection software: eTBLAST, CrossCheck, and WCopyfind. Plagiarism was suspected in manuscripts with more than 10% of the text derived from other sources. These manuscripts were checked against the Déjà vu database and manually verified by investigators. Of 754 submitted manuscripts, 105 (14%) were identified by the software as suspicious of plagiarism. Manual verification confirmed that 85 (11%) manuscripts were plagiarized: 63 (8%) were true plagiarism and 22 (3%) were self-plagiarism. Plagiarized manuscripts were mostly submitted from China (21%), Croatia (14%), and Turkey (19%). There was no significant difference in the text similarity rate between plagiarized and self-plagiarized manuscripts (25% [95% CI 22-27%] vs. 28% [95% CI 20-33%]; U = 645.50; P = 0.634). Differences in text similarity rate were found between various sections of self-plagiarized manuscripts (H = 12.65, P = 0.013). The plagiarism rate in the Materials and Methods (61% (95% CI 41-68%) was higher than in the Results (23% [95% CI 17-36%], U = 33.50; P = 0.009) or Discussion (25.5 [95% CI 15-35%]; U = 57.50; P < 0.001) sections. Three authors were identified in the Déjà vu database. Plagiarism detection software combined with manual verification may be used to detect plagiarized manuscripts and prevent their publication. The prevalence of plagiarized manuscripts submitted to the CMJ, a journal dedicated to promoting research integrity, was 11% in the 2-year period 2009-2010.

“Why We Say No! A Look Through the Editor’s Eye”

“…There are many views as well as guidelines on this aspect [BMJ, COPE] The part of manuscript where plagiarism has been detected has to be considered important for further processing of the article. [13,[24][25][26][27][28].…”

Google versus other text similarity tools in detection of plagiarism: a pilot study in the Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research

“…At times, plagiarism might arise in conditions where an author does not have a good command of English and ends up plagiarising the manuscript. 4,5 The impact of plagiarism varies, depending on the type of manuscript, ie research work, case reports, or reviews. If text similarity is present in certain sections of manuscripts, where it can be fixed or it does not invalidate the work done, we believe a second opportunity should be provided, especially in the case of inexperienced authors whose writing skills are not scientifically appreciable.…”

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A study conducted by Baždarić and colleagues 4 in 2012 showed that 14% of manuscripts submitted to the Croatian Medical Journal were suspected of plagiarism. However, on manual verification, 11% of these submissions were considered plagiarised.

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March 2013 editorial: Operational Statistics for the APESM Journal (Jan 2012–Feb 2013)

“…Baždarić et al checked all manuscripts submitted to the Croatian Medical Journal in 2009 and 2010 using plagiarism detection software. Manual verification confirmed that 11 % of manuscripts were plagiarized [9]. These numbers seem small compared to the 31 % of papers submitted to the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science (designated as a key academic journal by the National Natural Science Foundation of China) which were detected to contain ''unoriginal material'' [10].…”