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Prevalence of Plagiarism in Recent Submissions to the Croatian Medical Journal

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Abstract

To assess the prevalence of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted for publication in the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ). All manuscripts submitted in 2009–2010 were analyzed using plagiarism detection software: eTBLAST, CrossCheck, and WCopyfind. Plagiarism was suspected in manuscripts with more than 10% of the text derived from other sources. These manuscripts were checked against the Déjà vu database and manually verified by investigators. Of 754 submitted manuscripts, 105 (14%) were identified by the software as suspicious of plagiarism. Manual verification confirmed that 85 (11%) manuscripts were plagiarized: 63 (8%) were true plagiarism and 22 (3%) were self-plagiarism. Plagiarized manuscripts were mostly submitted from China (21%), Croatia (14%), and Turkey (19%). There was no significant difference in the text similarity rate between plagiarized and self-plagiarized manuscripts (25% [95% CI 22–27%] vs. 28% [95% CI 20–33%]; U = 645.50; P = 0.634). Differences in text similarity rate were found between various sections of self-plagiarized manuscripts (H = 12.65, P = 0.013). The plagiarism rate in the Materials and Methods (61% (95% CI 41–68%) was higher than in the Results (23% [95% CI 17–36%], U = 33.50; P = 0.009) or Discussion (25.5 [95% CI 15–35%]; U = 57.50; P < 0.001) sections. Three authors were identified in the Déjà vu database. Plagiarism detection software combined with manual verification may be used to detect plagiarized manuscripts and prevent their publication. The prevalence of plagiarized manuscripts submitted to the CMJ, a journal dedicated to promoting research integrity, was 11% in the 2-year period 2009–2010.

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Notes

  1. The CrossCheck database contains over 25.5 million papers from over 48,000 journals and books from 83 publishers, but most of these contents are accessible only through subscription (Butler 2010, Garner 2011).

  2. These counts were not double-checked by another investigator.

Abbreviations

CMJ:

Croatian Medical Journal

COPE:

Committee on Publication Ethics

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Ana Marušić and Ivan Damjanov (editors-in-chief during the 2009–2011), Matko Marušić (founder and editor emeritus), Vedran Katavić, Dario Sambunjak and Vesna Kušec (editorial board members during the 2009–2011) from the Croatian Medical Journal, Aleksandra Mišak (translator) and Elizabeth Wager (COPE).

Funding

The study is part of the scientific project “Prevalence and attitude towards plagiarism” (No. 062-0000000-3552) supported by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education, and Sports and project “Prevalence and attitudes towards plagiarism in biomedical publishing” supported by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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Correspondence to Ksenija Baždarić.

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Baždarić, K., Bilić-Zulle, L., Brumini, G. et al. Prevalence of Plagiarism in Recent Submissions to the Croatian Medical Journal . Sci Eng Ethics 18, 223–239 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9347-2

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