The Detection of Plagiarism

Recently, during the review process of submitted manuscripts, one of our journal reviewers informed me about a case of suspected plagiarism. I thanked the reviewer and checked the degree of copying and found blatant plagiarism. There was unattributed use of large portions of text from another source, including the abstract, materials and methods, and even the tables. According to the research ethics regulations of the Korean Academy of Family Medicine, the corresponding authors were asked to submit an appeal letter for the suspected plagiarism. The corresponding author replied that the first author did not have any knowledge of plagiarism, because she was a beginner researcher who had not yet experienced the process of writing a thesis. The board of directors of the Korean Academy of Family Medicine decided to penalize the authors by not permitting their articles to be published in the Korean Journal of Family Medicine (KJFM) for a period of two years. Undoubtedly, plagiarism is one of the most serious and common misconduct within research. Similarity Check powered by iThenticate is an initiative started by CrossRef to help its members actively engage in the prevention of scholarly and professional plagiarism. If these plagiarized manuscripts continue to be submitted to the KJFM, our journal’s reputation will decline and the quality of our journal may deteriorate. In this case, the reviewer discovered the plagiarism through a Google search. Plagiarism detection software has considerably affected the quality of scientific publishing. Faced with this challenge, the editorial board of our journal has decided to introduce CrossCheck. Similar to the case of the Croatian Medical Journal, the plagiarism detection procedure consists of automatic scanning of manuscripts using the software (CrossCheck) and manual verification of manuscripts suspected of having been plagiarized (more than 10% text similarity). In KJFM, a few plagiarized manuscripts were found, mostly by chance. Through the introduction of CrossCheck, It is expected that the risk of plagiarism can be managed systematically, which will contribute to improvement in the quality of the journal.