Analysis of CrossCheck Data on Two Years' Worth of Papers Submitted to Archives of Plastic Surgery

Copyright © 2014 The Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. www.e-aps.org All manuscripts submitted to the Archives of Plastic Surgery are run through CrossCheck using the software powered by iThenticate to compare their similarity with previously published papers [1]. The editors use the results of this comparison for reference in manuscript screening. The results include the similarity index, which represents the overall similarity of a submitted manuscript to previously published papers. The author analyzed the similarity index of the manuscripts submitted to the Archives of Plastic Surgery for two years from the year 2012 to 2013, a total of 440 manuscripts: 289 manuscripts in 2012 and 151 manuscripts in 2013. The overall similarity index of 2013 fell from 2012 (Fig. 1). Although this decrease was not statistically significant, we assume the reason for the decrease was the introduction of the use of CrossCheck for authors. The similarity index of the manuscripts that were accepted was lower than that of the manuscripts that were not accepted (P = 0.046) (Fig. 2). This implies that manuscripts accepted for publication are likely to be of better quality. The similarity index of papers submitted from English-dominant countries was lower than that for authors from countries that primarily speak another language (P = 0.016) (Fig. 3). This may imply that a language barrier plays a role in limiting the quality Jang Hyun Lee