Dear all,

in my opinion, there are some problems about these issues: Sometimes you have to describe your experimental apparatus or your procedure or the equations of literature. These parts are always the same.

My last submission was rejected because there was 27% of plagiarism. Of course, there was plagiarism! I was describing the neural network procedures and the equations of literature for comparison. It was "auto-Plagiarism" from my previous paper, but I cannot change the neural network description. Neural network are neural network! And literature equations are literature equations... So I think that reviewers or editors have to check carefully the parts affected by plagiarism and don't trust blindly to software.

You should avoid copy-paste text of others and consult a native speaker or translator before submitting to a journal

I use "Viper" which is a free plagiarism checker software to control my students papers against plagiarism. It is downloadable via the following link:

http://www.scanmyessay.com/

After creating a username and password, you can control your document for plagiarism while you are connected to internet.

As a personal experience, Viper checks your text with the open access documents nor with subscription based ones.

Furthermore, there are several web-based solutions like:

http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/

http://plagiarism-detect.com/

I hope this information helps....

Dear Khaled. Thank you for sharing your question on the same topic.

Dear Sir, Here are few links which could be used to detect plagiarism.

http://www.plagscan.com/seesources/

http://www.plagtracker.com/

http://www.scanmyessay.com/plagiarism-free-software.php

http://elearningindustry.com/top-10-free-plagiarism-detection-tools-for-teachers

Thanks

In order to check your documents for potential plagiarism use Noplag Plagiarism Checker https://noplag.com/. Noplag can calculate the similarity index for your manuscript and find eventual unintentional plagiarism: the overall similarity index and the corresponding color scaling of the icons provides a basic indication of plagiarism percentage of how much information contained in a specific submission is matched to other sources in the Noplag Database. This number is a raw amount of matching done against the databases selected for the assignment the submission was made to.

Noplag database contains more than 5 + Million academic papers to check against; 10+ Million publications; 1.3+ Billion pages on the Web and all that within less than 1 minute and single check. All your plagiarism reports will be organized in the convenient chronological order and presented to you in the beautiful, user friendly design.

Hope, that helps you!

Can anyone tell what is the acceptable similarity index range for various scientific journals

Good follow-up question Dear @Dayakar Gandla. I am also interested to find such a list. Definitely, a similarity index above 40 percent is almost always problematic. However, I would imagine that this would vary for Journal to Journal and even among publishers (Elsevier, Wiley,  Springier, ...). There's just too much possible variation, and the probability of matching someone else's words by chance is negligible.  

As I know, there are two known similarity checking programs, iThenticate and Turnitin. At our university, we use iThenticate.

Papers submitted to Turnitin may be compared against billions of internet documents, archived internet data that is no longer available on the live web, a local repository of previously submitted papers, and subscription repository of periodicals, journals, and publications.

The Similarity Report provides a summary of matching or similar areas of text found in a submitted paper. When a Similarity Report is available to be viewed an icon is placed in the Similarity column of the student class portfolio page. Similarity Reports that have not finished generating will display the text processing within the Similarity column of the student class portfolio page. 

https://guides.turnitin.com/01_Manuals_and_Guides/Student_Guides/Turnitin_Classic_for_Students/17_The_Similarity_Report

I have a point here, in the related work section, we normally rephrase (in our own words) the results of the others to pass the "plagiarism test", however, this has 2 disadvantages:

1- it takes time and efforts from the researchers, which can be employed to accomplish the real work, such as enhancing the methods, and results section.

2- rephrasing the others' works might not give the same meaning intended by the original authors.

my question, why we are so tense in this regard?

My point: If my methods, results or conclusions are copied from another work, this means plagiarism, but if I am describing a related work using the same words with a reference to the original work, this should not be considered as a plagiarism.

Dear All RG colleagues,

Happy New Year 2017,

Please track the following free of charge similarity checker website,

Regards, Emad

https://veriguide4.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/vg_report/app/report_error.jsp

Dear Mahmoud Omid

Try Check yourself (with Grammarly) first : https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism. and Free Article Checker Online https://searchenginereports.net/plagiarism-checker/

Thank you

Yes I agree with Ahmed Al mayahi; there are online platforms for doing so.

Dear  Mahmoud Omid ,

Similarity index is a comparison of the current vegetation (in terms of kinds, proportions, and amounts) on an ecological site to what the site is capable of producing at its reference state. According to the BLM Ecological Site Inventory technical reference, “A similarity index determines how closely the current plant community resembles either the potential natural community or some other reference community.” Similarity index is expressed as percentage of the reference community that is currently on an ecological site. These percentages can, in some cases, be construed as successional stages (see table below).

http://wiki.landscapetoolbox.org/doku.php/field_methods:similarity_index

Regards, Shafagat

Dear @Shafagat Mahmudova . thanks for your contribution. But here I am asking about a different similarity index. It is when we submit a new manuscript to a journal. Editor initially checks against potential plagiarism and if this index is high then they won't proceed with its evaluation.

Happy New Year.

Dear Dr Omid

As far as I know you can use Turnitin and Viber programs for similarity check but for limited number of papers.

Regards

Ithenticate

Repeat a truth does not do damage to anyone, but repeating a lie is tired. I think that similarity indexes can be subjected to error.

Recently one of our recent joint publication was evaluated by plagscan

The editor wrote us as follows "Your submitted manuscript having a similarity index of 17%, which needs to be reduced within 15% (not more than 4% from a single source) [Find attachment]. Pl revise your manuscript, highlight the changes part with yellow color and send me  the "Revised Manuscript" (Highlighted) and Similarity report.

Dear all,

in my opinion, there are some problems about these issues: Sometimes you have to describe your experimental apparatus or your procedure or the equations of literature. These parts are always the same.

My last submission was rejected because there was 27% of plagiarism. Of course, there was plagiarism! I was describing the neural network procedures and the equations of literature for comparison. It was "auto-Plagiarism" from my previous paper, but I cannot change the neural network description. Neural network are neural network! And literature equations are literature equations... So I think that reviewers or editors have to check carefully the parts affected by plagiarism and don't trust blindly to software.

Dear colleague

The Similarity Report provides a summary of matching or similar areas of text found in a submitted paper. When a Similarity Report is available to be viewed an icon is placed in the Similarity column of the student class portfolio page. Similarity Reports that have not finished generating will display the text processing within the Similarity column of the student class portfolio page. Papers submitted to Turnitin may be compared against billions of internet documents, archived internet data that is no longer available on the live web, a local repository of previously submitted papers, and subscription repository of periodicals, journals, and publications. The comparison may be against any or all of these repositories as set on a specific assignment by the instructor of the class. Turnitin may be compared against billions of internet documents, archived internet data that is no longer available on the live web, a local repository of previously submitted papers, and subscription repository of periodicals, journals, and publications. The comparison may be against any or all of these repositories as set on a specific assignment by the instructor of the class. 

The comparison document is called a Similarity Report. This document details the matching or similar text between a submission made on Turnitin and the documents the submission was compared against. This document is listed in the instructor’s view of the class assignment inbox.

Regards 

Is there any genuine software to check similarity index or plagiarism other than 'ithenticate' which is highly expensive and even free trial version also not available. I already used plagscan,noplag etc,but, their similarity index is far from true similarity index and are not worthy for checking similarity index of our manuscripts before submitting to a journal.

Dear Dr Omid

I agree with Dr Pierantozzi when he spoke about the experimental setup.I have another problem here. As I work in one field of science and I have my own sentences and words, they always become a part of similarity. This issue forced me to change my sentences and write in another mode that make me feels as the paper is written by someone else.

Regards

Dear all,

I find this issue an important and a discussion a fruitful!

However, I have now a problem, which I could not find in this discussion.

Recently, I received a letter from one of the MDPI journals with a notification about refusal to accept our manuscript. In explanation it was written that "... similarity index of 23% is still high, we request that it should be below 10%." However,

1) This 23% of similarity is just from our own publication published in Proceedings in 2014;

2) These Proceedings were not peer-reviewed by reviewers;

3) We have gave reference on this publication;

4) We explained in details in the text of our manuscript what is the difference between past proceeding paper and a new one.

However, all this did not help us.

Now we have submitted this manuscript to another journal - without any changes.

I interested by yours opinions - is our case may be considered as plagiarism?

Best regards,

Leonid

Technology has shrunk the world, todays every work is known. Unfortunately the machine decision making of identifying plagiarism is textual on the content and not on to the author verification. May be the newer versions of Plagiarism checking software's could take it as their scope of work. 

Dear Leonid

From my experience, YES, your article has similarity and plagiarism. However, most of journal ask for less than 20% similarity. I don't know why this journal exaggerated in its index. I think it is easy to you to reduce the similarity lower than 20%and submitting the article to another journal. I wish you luck and success.

Regards

Dear Migdam,

Thanks a lot for your response!

However, I cannot completely agree with it. First of all, according to the common determination of plagiarism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism), it includes " wrongful appropriation" and "stealing and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions" and the representation of them as one's own original work. In my case, we don't use ideas, words etc of other authors without referencing. Oppositely, the main part of our manuscript is extended version of our own proceeding paper. For my opinion, more appropriate names are "duplicate, multiple, or redundant publication" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_publication) or "text recycling" (http://publicationethics.org/text-recycling-guidelines).

I can recall that it was always accepted preliminary publishing a short paper in the conference proceedings and then extending this paper for publication in a normal, peer-reviewed journal. And I followed this practice many times before, and it was always OK. However, now a situation apparently has changed, and some journals begin demand very hard requirements about this issue. And here I agree with you - 10% seems exaggerated demand! For my opinion, proceeding paper may be published even 100% without any changes because 1) you are the author; 2) publication in conference proceedings is actually a declaration of your intention, not real publication; and 3) in the peer-reviewed paper you may clearly indicate on the publication in conference proceedings and inform readers what changes (if at all) were made in the text or results. 

Also, I see a problem with criteria for decision accepted by editorial staff. In my case, for example, I received the first letter from Assistance Editor: "Please confirm that you have made sufficient extension (at least 40%) to the conference versions. At the same time, please send copy of your conference paper to us." I responded soon confirming that I made substantial changes in original text and the current similarity index is 30% (23% is due to our own proceeding paper). After some time I received a new response from another Editorial member as follows: "... similarity index of 23% is still high, we request that it should be below 10%." Thus, this statement was very different from the first one! Moreover, after I made my own similarity analysis (by the "Viper" software), I have found that a similarity index is only 12%, including appr. a half coming from the References! Therefore, I believe that Editorial staff should have more elaborated criteria for decision making!  

However, after all, I don't see a big problem in the changing the text (we already did this several times) or even submitting to another journal (what we did last days). I have only two problems: time and money (because after large changes I should send a revised text to the paid editing service for help).

Sincerely,

Leonid

Dear all, just a few thoughts from me

1. For sure, using software to detect similarity might have limits, and this is a problem. Especially if abstracts are taken into account when testing for similarity. This is maybe an issue that should be addressed separately.

2. However, I want to encourage you to minimize "self-plagiarism": if you have written, e.g., a paper on your apparatus, then there is no need to describe it in detail  in any of your further publications. Just reference it shortly, and that's it. In times when literature is multiplying so fast and -on the other hand- nearly every literature is availabe within seconds, it' s also our responsibility not to re-write our own works to create more redundance that there is already. 

By the way: If you publish, it is common that you give away a lot of rights on the text to the publisher, so in such a case, it might be "only" self-plagiarism, but it  might be nevertheless using a text without permission.

3. Also when you reference to others: Use your own words to paraphrase (only) what is important in the context of your work. If you get high similiarity if you are technically citing other authors - then do just that: cite/reference them. I think if  we all do that thouroughly, then we can even improve readability and clarity of our scientific works. 

I just simply recommend the link below, it is free of charge!

Regards, Emad

http://www.veriguide.org

Really excellent question and answers, congratulations dear Dr. Omid, Sir and thank you so much for sharing this topic.

Regards, Emad

turnitin is best web as i am also using this for checking

Thank you for your answer. The link to start using turnitin is given below:

https://guides.turnitin.com/

Checking plagiarism relies on advanced algorithms that crawl the web and collect data from a variety of sources around the world. These sources include web pages, publisher databases, and university repositories. After collecting all the sources, the next step is to compare them along with your document.

All this complext process is simplified with oxphrase.com.

You can detect plagiarism and generate readable PDF reports with only a few clicks. In addition, it is responsive and accessible from any platform (mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop). Unlike other well-known plagiarism checkers, oxphrase can process multi-language and check more than one document simultaneously.

oxphrase is the most accurate, fast easy to use plagiarism checker.

https://www.oxphrase.com

Checking for image plagiarism

How to Spot Fake Photos on the Web

The reverse image search—a search on the web for matches to a particular image—is one of the most useful tools available to a fake photo spotter. Use Google Image Search to search by file or URL (click the camera), or an alternative like TinEye to do the same job.

What you might find are dozens of matches of the same photograph, which might not get you anywhere, but if you’re lucky the search will turn up the original, unedited picture as well so you can see which alterations were made. If the fake photo is a composite of several other images, again you might dig up the originals.

Tools:

https://images.google.com/

https://www.tineye.com/

You can check by Google searching

I am using Plagiarism Cheker X, its nice but not accurate

PlagScan is also free to use for checking similarity index of research papers. Great enlightenments of other software of free access for checking plagiarism by respected colleagues. Nice query Prof. Kind Regards

PlagScan is free only for testing period and after registration.

turnitin software is the BEST to know about Similarity Index of an article.

Insightful contributions

To check the similarity index and any plagiarism we have purchased the turnitin software at our University. These days it is essential to check all the manuscripts, dissertations and thesis prior it's submission.

Very informative thread. I learnt a lot. I have been using ithenticate for a while.

Most of the links and software that I have in mind and used most of them

like Plagscan, turnintin, ithenicate ...... etc...... are mentioned by respected

RG colleagues ....... following

As Abubakar Bala said, a very informative thread.

I know from own experience, that evaluation of a calculated similiarity is not an easy or straightforward task. There are no clear thresholds but it mainly depends where are the similar parts and how extended are they. A similiarity in the introduction is in my opinion less relevant as e.g. in the results+discussion part.

Similarity index is differing from plagiarism that finds out similarity percentage to the other published documents earlier. Similarity index is estimation of resemblance to another person’s writings through scanning process of any standard anti –plagiarism software tool. It is practice of today that any work to be published has to check similarity index.

Turnitin is best, another alternative to turnitin is https://preparmy.com/recommends/grammarly

what can i do when i write the introduction or methods of my research, i am obligated to write them from former studies, so the similarity index will be high, it is unfair

List of Best Free Plagiarism Software:

01. Dupli Checker

02. Copyleaks

03. PaperRater

04. Plagiarisma

05. Plagiarism Checker

06. Plagium

07. PlagScan

08. PlagTracker

09. Quetext

10. Viper

11. Grammarly’s

12. Small Seo Tools

13. Edubirdie

14. Dustball

15. DMCA

16. Unicheck

17. WebConf's similar page checker

18. Urkund (It is free to download for use within schools and academic organisations that are subscribers of the URKUND system.)

List of Best Paid Plagiarism Software:

01. ithenticate

02. Turnitin

03. Whitesmoke

04. ProWritingAid

the % of check of plagairsm check will vary from the resarch perspetive.

the % o ilar to your day to dayrequiremns theny ou

Here is a list of the top 8 free plagiarism checker tools available today.

you

https://eduzaurus.com/plagiarism-checker

Mahmoud Omid -

Turnitin is the best. However, try these checkers, it may be useful;

https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/

https://edubirdie.com/plagiarism-checker