Shouldn't the following be excluded from plagiarism checking: title, author names, authors' affiliations, abstract keywords, tests sub/titles, equipment names, figure legends, statistical analysis methodology.
Similarity will certainly contribute to a higher plagiarism index. However, I believe that some parts of any article nowadays cannot be made unique no matter your paraphrasing ability. This is simply because of the great number of papers published yearly in one's field of interest.
Some parts (like test names, equipment's names, chemicals' names, statistical analysis paragraph..etc) should not be made unique. They cannot be altered and no specific citation should be added for any of them usually.
I could not find any guideline on what to include for plagiarism checking or whether publishers check the article full for plagiarism or exclude somethings. Moreover, do they consider matches with papers published in predatory journals?! Does someone have any full list of all predatory publishers (one that is updated in real time)?
I think with more and more papers published year by year, plagiarism tools need to be tweaked or a higher plagiarism index should be accepted. When there were only few publishers online, I guess the system was somewhat efficient, but is it still efficient with hundreds of publishers publishing thousands of papers yearly, and even publishing conference proceedings online from hundreds of conferences worldwide (ALL in English). There must come a time when sentences overlap, right?
Hi Bassel - plagiarism software is no substitute for 'common sense' approaches to publication manuscript submission. They should, instead, be mainly viewed as a 'front'line red flag' tool. Anything that looks 'suspicious' requires further inverstigation. If most of the cross-match relates to standard academic names, procedures etc - then that should be fine. Software tools, such as Turnitin for example, allow you to 'turn-off' certain matching - such as direct quotation and bibliography lists becasue they are supposeed to match directly. Software tools do not discriminate between sources i.e. predatory journals. If the copy source is published in the public domin - they should pick up on the match - depending on how extensiove the public domain sources are that are caputured by the software developers. Sometimes publishers will tell you that they automatically submit manuscripts to anti-plagiarism software, others do not tell you - but do. Others still do not use such software. The best policy, if authors are unsure, is to submit adraft to their own or institutions software to double-check before submitting to journals.
Hi Bassel - plagiarism software is no substitute for 'common sense' approaches to publication manuscript submission. They should, instead, be mainly viewed as a 'front'line red flag' tool. Anything that looks 'suspicious' requires further inverstigation. If most of the cross-match relates to standard academic names, procedures etc - then that should be fine. Software tools, such as Turnitin for example, allow you to 'turn-off' certain matching - such as direct quotation and bibliography lists becasue they are supposeed to match directly. Software tools do not discriminate between sources i.e. predatory journals. If the copy source is published in the public domin - they should pick up on the match - depending on how extensiove the public domain sources are that are caputured by the software developers. Sometimes publishers will tell you that they automatically submit manuscripts to anti-plagiarism software, others do not tell you - but do. Others still do not use such software. The best policy, if authors are unsure, is to submit adraft to their own or institutions software to double-check before submitting to journals.
This is very interesting Dr Whitehead. I believe it is a significant limitation the inability of software tools to discriminate peer-reviewed publications from those in predatory sources. Similarities with papers in predatory journals should not be counted, in my opinion. Papers published with no review process should hold as much weight as personal blogs. It is frustrating that publishers and editors have the power to put scholarly work under intense scrutiny, but they continue to enjoy freedom from accountability to any regulatory body whatsoever. When one's work goes unchecked, misjudgments and errors are bound to be repeated. The only rules and criteria publishers follow are what they decided. Though my experience in submitting articles and defending them is still limited, but I cannot help but notice that the system is severely flawed. No wonder data reproducibility for most published papers is unattainable. I think the whole system needs to be revolutionized. A global effort has to be done to ensure that scientific papers actually contain scientific evidence. Acceptable similarity and the plagiarism index should be decided and updated regularly. If turnitine is a blind tool, sooner or later, people will have described dose administration and cell treatment in every possible way, making similarity simply unavoidable. and uniqueness unrealizable outside the novel fields of research.un
Sure, we may need to make the allowable length of a phrase being duplicated a little bit longer than hitherto, but not by much, I think. In any case, you may cheat almost every system by simply using synonyms; I am certain there is already a program that takes a chunk of text and returns something that is almost equivalent but uses synonyms where there are such options, and that might fool most plagiarism programs. At our university we do that on student's hand-ins, but lo and behold - there is a way to fool the system anyway, by means of adding to the text INVISIBLE characters! While they are not seen they are counted as regular characters, and can therefore be used to basically scramble the original text. How on Earth someone can be so ill-spirited to devise such a scam, I do not know. But it most be a regular bastard.
Wow! Invisible characters... this seems dangerous if misused to republish something over and over again in different journals. The more I learn about current plagiarism checking measures, I realize how limited the system is.
I think current plagiarism tools are very limited and publishers need to update their policies. Furthermore, they should be accountable to some authority. As far as I am concerned, plagiarism in scientific writing should only refer to stealing someone else's findings or methods and claiming them to be self-generated. Beyond that, similarity should not be an issue unless we are talking about social sciences. Writing is a product of reading. Everyone is bound to be influenced by someone and inspired by the eloquence of one or more good native writers. Why should it be wrong to imitate the way they write and use their vocabulary to express an interesting point or describe a physiological process? Why should they be cited if the scientific evidence they generated was not utilized whatsoever in one's work? Unless the power of their words is what matters - and this only applies to poets and story writers - to use their expressions should not be a big deal in a scientific paper. The focus should be on the scientific evidence contained in it. If it is novel and unique, that is it! Stipulating a plagiarism index (15% or 20%) fixed is wrong. What if all the similarity, or most, is in the methodology and results sections? Should a paper with 21% similarity concentrated in the introduction and discussion be rejected; and an article with 14% similarity mainly contained in the results be accepted?! ,,,, And does it make sense to force scholars to abandon the best of expressions when writing the introduction and discussion and most concise only because they were previously composed by another? Does it make sense to cite the composer when his actual scientific work has no correlation to the present work? And how is it logical that to paraphrase his/her words is okay and absolves one from citing the source?! In fact, I believe this is a very dangerous proposal. If one was to paraphrase what Jesus said in the bible and lecture people without having to mention that he/she is paraphrasing a wise man, people will think that he/she is a wise man. Paraphrasing is a dangerous tool. Authors should instead be allowed "expression-similarity" in their articles and be disallowed "evidence-similarity". If this were to be applied, citations will make much more sense. One will only be cited for what he/she did and not how he/she expressed himself/herself. Papers will become much more enjoyable to read and write with no limitations on the use of language. Nonnative authors will start to sound way better as they will be free to use the vocabulary of native writers without having to cite every expression and sentence borrowed. Intellectual property in scientific papers should only cover the novel technique /finding they report on. Maybe this should be a special rule just for scientific writing. Then one can add to the acknowledgements his/her sources of inspiration for writing.
The trouble is if e.g., predatory magazine are excluded from so-called similarity checks, the the plagiarists will only use predatory journals to plagiarise from!
Prof. Dean is right! Double-check your research paper for possible traces of plagiarized substances in it using institutional anti-plagiarism scan softwares. However, the best approach is to learn to be anti-plagiaristic in our approach in writing scientific papers by being sincere and honest in our write-ups...clinging to the virtues of truth!
Dear Dr Kennedy, I think it is time plagiarism checks ceased to be blind processes. What about authors plagiarizing things written in other scholars' personal websites or blogs. I don't understand why similarity with an article in a predatory journal should be counted as plagiarism when similarity with other forms of non-peer-reviewed writings is not even checked. The policy on plagiarism, as I see, needs to be amended. Although writers should write in good faith as Mr Adom noted, the present system suffers from limitations. Maybe plagiarism in the methodology and the results sections should be given higher weight against plagiarism of non-evidence-related sentences. Maybe plagiarism from predatory journals should be given a lower ranking. Then, a fixed index can be introduced and presented as a weighted average. This will be much more precise.
The problem with so-called similarity checkers is that they can only be as good as their databases. Turnitin does not cover IEEE journals that require a subscription. And they are not upfront about it, giving lecturers and referees a false sense of security. The preferred action of Turnitin is to scan free journals, irrespective of whether they are genuine or predatory, peer-reviewed or not, as the plagiarist does not care anyway. The point I was trying to make is that knowledge of this drives plagiarists to copy from inferior and obscure sources. So, should Turnitin advertise their sources if this knowledge will just drive the plagiarists to other sources?
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Academic Journals