Plagiarism is the intentional reproduction of other people's work, with the intent of passing it off as one's own and getting credit for it. This should always be discouraged. Having said this, a good dose of common sense is required when examining text that has been identified as originating from another source – certain technical expressions are long, and need to be repeated, and it can happen that instances arise where, no matter how often one changes the wording, the resultant text will be the same as a few sentences published elsewhere! In science, this is especially true where referring to laws and descriptions of methods, but where the results section of one paper resembles another too closely, alarm bells should ring and the nature of the overlap should be checked. I believe that a better question would be: "Should editors checking the overlap identified by an automatic check consider the nature of the overlap before taking action, or should they tell the authors to rewrite the relevant sections?". My response to this question would be that an intelligent assessment of the nature of the overlap and a determination of the novelty of the work under consideration should always be made.

Please see the following discussions

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_range_of_percentage_similarity_of_plagiarism_for_a_review_article

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_to_find_similarity_index2

Best Regards Muhammad Adnan

Thank you Suzy Lidstrom and Osama Rahil for your responses.

Following

Please note that most plagiarism detection tools check for similarity, and not for plagiarism. These tools identify material in your work that matches text from documents in their extensive repositories. When you subject your article for a plagiarism check, the results give a percentage score, known as Similarity Index. The Similarity Index gives an indication of similar contents that has been found in other published materials or theses. If the author argues and proves that she/he has streamlined the arguments by citing and referencing the material, then that cannot be construed as plagiarism!

As far as plagiarism is concerned, the ideal strategy must be zero tolerance. However, do not equate plagiarism with similarity. You cannot make someone guilty of plagiarism simply because the software identified a few consecutive words identical to someone else's writing. To safeguard such cases of inadvertent similarities, some limits are prescribed for exclusion. In India, the UGC prescribes exclusion of the following from similarity checks (UGC, 2018):

• Information put in quotations with necessary permission or attribution
• References or bibliography, table of contents, preface, and acknowledgements
• Generic terms, laws, standard symbols, and standards equations
• Common knowledge or coincidental terms consisting of less than 14 consecutive words.

UGC [University Grants Commission] 2018. University Grants Commission (Promotion of academic integrity and prevention of plagiarism in higher educational institutions) Regulations, 2018. The Gazette of India notification No. F. 1-18/2010(CPP-II) dated 23rd July, 2018. Available: https://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/ 7771545_academic-integrity-Regulation2018.pdf

@C George Thomas, thank you sir

Great insight at George

Plagiarism means the intent of passing someone else’s work as your own and getting credit for it and it should not be tolerated in any case. Most of the plagiarism detection tools check similarity and not plagiarism. Both are different and similarity index should not be seen as a measure of plagiarism.