Nowadays every publisher is more dependent on plagiarism report than the reviewer comments. Sometimes it's very annoying/discouraging to see the name of the author, address, Keywords, Row and column numbers are showing as plagiarized content. Sometimes, some words of your article will be matching with some source that you never heard/seen as plagiarized content.
So, the authors are forced to change the article with the cost of reducing its readability. Is it a correct policy?
Is plagiarism check is reducing the readability of article instead of increasing the novelty?
Too much machine dependency is creating this problem?
How to tackle this problem?
This is an interesting point of view which I thought about many times when I received similarity reports. I think there is a huge confusion in the scientific community between the words "Similarity" and "Plagiarism". Editors should be fully aware of the difference and should be able to evaluate similar content based on its position and contribution to the manuscript statement, not merely a percentage from the checking software.
When automatically generated information is being used, the answer is always to apply common sense. A glance down the report generated by comparing any manuscript with all existing publications will enable an immediate comparison to be made to determine whether text has been copied from an exiting publication. If a few phrases and expressions are picked up scattered throughout a document, then the source of the "overlap" is probably the similarity of the subject matter, however where a few successive paragraphs or pages exhibit an almost word for word overlap, something must have been copied too closely.
Personally, I am always suspicious when my notes read well – did I write down a phrase that I had read, or did I rewrite it in an attempt to capture the essence of something read or heard? If I have already rephrased text, I always worry that I might revert to the original wording through the very act of trying to rephrase the notes! Cross-checking documents enables one to eliminate any such inadvertent errors, as a result of which, I welcome the check.
Abdelrahman makes a good point when he says that editors "should be fully aware of the difference [between plagiarised text and content that is merely similar]". However you specifically mention that an article that you have not heard of has been identified as the source of text that is deemed to have been copied. You should not be too surprised at this – there are many published papers containing content that has been plagiarised, and it is fully possible that the paper identified as the source from which you were deemed to have copied text was not the original paper, but a later plagiarised version of it. Rather than waste too much time on a red herring, I would suggest that you seek out your primary references and examine them carefully to determine whether the text that you submitted resembled the original source too closely. If it does not, then I suggest that you ask the journal to identify where the copied text came from originally rather than only giving the most recent source as I believe that they can trace it back.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Linguistics
- Composition Studies
- Publisher