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A surge in withdrawn papers is highlighting weaknesses in the system for handling them.

In recent years, several online tools have appeared capable of identifying potential plagiarism in science. While such tools may help to maintain or even increase the originality and ethical quality of the scientific literature, no apparent consensus exists among editors on the degree of plagiarism or self-plagiarism necessary to reject or retract manuscripts. In this study, two entire volumes of published original papers and reviews from Basic & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology were retrospectively scanned for similarity in anonymized form using iThenticate software to explore measures to predictively identify true plagiarism and self-plagiarism and to potentially provide guidelines for future screening of incoming manuscripts. Several filters were applied, all of which appeared to lower the noise from irrelevant hits. The main conclusions were that plagiarism software offers a unique opportunity to screen for plagiarism easily but also that it has to be employed with caution as automated or uncritical use is far too unreliable to allow a fair basis for judging the degree of plagiarism in a manuscript. This remains the job of senior editors. Whereas a few cases of self-plagiarism that would not likely have been accepted with today's guidelines were indeed identified, no cases of fraud or serious plagiarism were found. Potential guidelines are discussed.

Abstract The detection of plagiarism in scholarly articles is a complex process. It requires not just quantitative analysis with the similarity recording by anti-plagiarism software but also assessment of the readers' opinion, pointing to the theft of ideas, methodologies, and graphics. In this article we describe a blatant case of plagiarism by Chinese authors, who copied a Russian article from a non-indexed and not widely visible Russian journal, and published their own report in English in an open-access journal indexed by Scopus and Web of Science and archived in PubMed Central. The details of copying in the translated English article were presented by the Russian author to the chief editor of the index journal, consultants from Scopus, anti-plagiarism experts, and the administrator of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The correspondents from Scopus and COPE pointed to the decisive role of the editors' of the English journal who may consider further actions if plagiarism is confirmed. After all, the chief editor of the English journal retracted the article on grounds of plagiarism and published a retraction note, although no details of the complexity of the case were reported. The case points to the need for combining anti-plagiarism efforts and actively seeking opinion of non-native English-speaking authors and readers who may spot intellectual theft which is not always detected by software.

I have encountered 3 cases of plagiarism as editor of the Journal of Korean Medical Science (JKMS). The first one was copying figures from a JKMS article without citation, the second was submission of a copied manuscript of a published article to JKMS, and the third was publishing a copied JKMS article in another journal. The first and third cases violated copyrights of JKMS, but the violating journals made no action on the misconduct. The second and third cases were slightly modified copies of the source articles but similarity check by the Crosscheck could not identify the text overlap initially and after one year reported 96% overlap for the second case. The similarity of the third case was reported 3%. The Crosscheck must upgrade its system for better reliable screening of text plagiarism. The copy of the second case was committed by a corrupt Chinese editing company and also by some unethical researchers. In conclusion, plagiarism still threatens the trustworthiness of the publishing enterprises and is a cumbersome burden for editors of scholarly journals. We require a better system to increase the vigilance and to prevent the misconduct.

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