Nature: Journals step up plagiarism policing

Cut-and-paste culture tackled by CrossCheck software. Nature News; Published online 5 July 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/466167a Declan Butler Major science publishers are gearing up to fight plagiarism. The publishers, including Elsevier and Springer, are set to roll out software across their journals that will scan submitted papers for identical or paraphrased chunks of text that appear in previously published articles. The move follows pilot tests of the software that have confirmed high levels of plagiarism in articles submitted to some journals, according to an informal survey by Nature of nine science publishers. Incredibly, one journal reported rejecting 23% of accepted submissions after checking for plagiarism. Over the past two years, many publishers (including Nature Publishing Group) have been trialling CrossCheck, a plagiarism checking service launched in June 2008 by CrossRef, a non-profit collaboration of 3,108 commercial and learned society publishers. The power of the service — which uses the iThenticate plagiarism software produced by iParadigms, a company in Oakland, California — is the size of its database of full-text articles, against which other articles can be compared. Publishers subscribing to CrossCheck must agree to share their own databases of manuscripts with it. So far, 83 publishers have joined the database, which has grown to include 25.5 million articles from 48,517 journals and books. ...(License Number 2257020292199) More -->