Accidental similarity

Abstract

The University of Oxford defines plagiarism as: "presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement."[1] There are various types of plagiarism, ranging from subtle (e.g.presenting others' ideas) to the not-so-subtle (e.g.presenting others' work), but in essence it means passing off someone else's work or ideas as your own.Most authors will agree that this is wrong, however, understanding the exact nature of plagiarism can often be tricky in environments where core research method knowledge lacks.With the internet of today providing so many more sources to cite from compared to years gone by, keeping track of similarity without a good similarity checker is often impossible.The vast majority of plagiarism cases I have had to deal with tend to be due to ignorance, rather than purpose (as a result I prefer the term similarity where copying was unintentional and plagiarism where there was clear signs of intent).Pre-publication, this requires a simple notification of the similarity score to the authors so that they can make amendments and correct identified sections of similarity.Within our journal flow, similarity is only checked once on initial submission.I suspect many other journals will reject a paper with high similarity, however, we have found that in most cases authors simply weren't aware that what they did could be considered plagiarism.Resultantly, we take a more supportive approach and rarely reject a paper based on an initially high similarity score.In the case below, the first submitted manuscript did not have a high similarity score.The two paragraphs, taken from another paper published in our journal a few years prior, were subsequently added to the discussion section.As similarity is not checked on resubmission, this was not picked up in the editorial workflow and the manuscript made it all the way to publication.The error was first picked up by the first author of the plagiarised paper.We followed the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines to determine the action required.[2]It became clear fairly quickly that ignorance from the lead author (of the subsequent paper) was the main driver behind the error.I liaised with the authors of both papers and it was agreed that a retraction would not be in anyone's best interest.We decided on an acknowledgment of fault and apology which was approved by both authors.At the African journal of Emergency Medicine, we acknowledge that emergency medicine is a new and evolving specialty on the continent, that many persons wishing to contribute to the local knowledge economy are clinician researchers and that most have very little to no formal research training.We have always taken a mentoring approach as evidenced by our Author Assist programme.

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