Be careful! Avoiding duplication: a case study
Editors' bounden duty
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As editors of the Journals of Zhejiang University-
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Yue-hong (Helen) ZHANG
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Project supported by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (December, 2010) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30824802) Zhejiang University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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SCIENCE (A/B/C), we have to point out that four
years of experience tells us that CrossCheck is indeed
an effective tool for detecting unoriginal content,
enabling our editors to preserve our journals integrity
and the authors copyright in our papers. However,
CrossCheck is just a useful tool for the editor to find
strings of similar text, but most instances of true
plagiarism cannot be identified solely by these strings.
Fig. 1 shows our experience and basic referenced
rules that we apply with regard to CrossCheck
similarity indexes. First of all, we briefly introduce two
concepts: (1) The overall similarity index (OSI) that
means the total percentage of similarity between a
submission and information existing in the
CrossCheck/iThenticate databases selected as search
targets; (2) The single match similarity index (SMSI)
that means the percentage of similarity from a single
source between the iThenticate database and the
submitted document. If a paper has an OSI>~40% or
an SMSI>~10%, we usually reject it out of hand; if
the OSI is between ~25% and ~40% or the SMSI is
between ~3% and ~10%, and if it appears in our
editorial judgement that the ideas may have been
plagiarized, the paper is usually returned for revision.
Papers with an OSI<~25% and SMSI<~3%, are
handled on a case-by-case basis; in most cases,
plagiarism is obscure, and we have to send the CrossCheck
similarity report to the author and make sure about
whether plagiarism is involved or not. If plagiarism is
acknowledged, editors usually reject directly or return
it for the author to re-write, based on the various
conditions. As CrossCheck cannot detect all kinds of
plagiarism and use of graphs etc., especially
plagiarism of ideas, even a low similarity score does not
mean there is no plagiarism. We always bear in mind
that an anti-plagiarism tool cannot detect all problems,
and more work in the checking process and use of
peer reviewers comments on originality and
innovation are still the most important factors to ensure the
quality of a paper.
3 What is the problem in method section of
bioscience papers?
In bioscience papers, besides the other scientific
misconduct issues, replication of the method section
is a common problem because duplication is always
being detected in the section Materials and Methods.
We editors often receive comments and queries from
authors who think that it is a matter of course to copy
their own published materials as opposed to copying
those of others. How should editors handle such
papers with similar content in the method section and
how to guide authors in writing the method section
without being accused of plagiarism? What is right?
What is wrong? Here we studied an example to
explain this problem.
4 Case study
In this case we asked the permission of the
author and the reviewer to discuss this paper as an
example of how to write the method section without too
much repetition.
A manuscript submitted to Journal of Zhejiang
University-SCIENCE B (Biomedicine &
Biotechnology) had gone through the peer review process;
however, before making the final decision on
publication, it is the journals practice to run a CrossCheck.
In this instance, the check revealed verbatim
repetition of the description of the methodology used, from
the authors own previous publications with only
partial citation. A comparison of the similar sections
is shown in Fig. 2a.
In the paper under study, the author used the
same methods as described in her published papers
to study a different topic. CrossCheck found more
than 1 000 words copied verbatim in the method
section from four previously published papers by the
same author. The similarity indices of these four
papers were 15%, 6%, 3%, and 1%. The author was
therefore asked to make revisions to avoid
selfplagiarism.
In her first revision, the author completely
replaced the description of the method with a citation,
as shown in Fig. 2b. This avoids the problem of
self-plagiarism, but the absence of any detail makes
the method section look a little thin. One of the
reviewers was asked for advice; his response was as
follows:
... If the method is exactly the same that [as] the
original one, I suppose that may be correct to express
in this way. But, usually there are minor
modifications from previous methods. Indeed, in the
manuscript I reviewed, authors said Glucosinolates were
extracted and analyzed as previously described with
minor modifications (Yuan et al., 2009). Besides,
even if the method is the same that [as] a previous one,
as a reader I think [it] is interesting to see some things
in the paper. As [an] example, [does she] use the
extraction method resin col (...truncated)