Be careful! Avoiding duplication: a case study

Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE B, Apr 2013

Yue-hong Helen Zhang, Xiao-yan Jia, Han-feng Lin, Xu-fei Tan

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Be careful! Avoiding duplication: a case study

Editors' bounden duty 0 1 0 As editors of the Journals of Zhejiang University- 1 Yue-hong (Helen) ZHANG 2 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 - 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)


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Yue-hong Helen Zhang, Xiao-yan Jia, Han-feng Lin, Xu-fei Tan. Be careful! Avoiding duplication: a case study, Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE B, 2013, pp. 355-358, Volume 14, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1631/jzus.B1300078