Adding new text to the paper such as in the introduction and conclusion can also help lower the similarity score for the entire manuscript and enable you to reach the targeted percentages so that your manuscript can advance to the review stage. Is it your introduction, methods, or discussion section? Often you will be able to rewrite text using synonyms and alternate phrasing to avoid duplications. How to Write Unique Scientific Papers: Quoting Without Plagiarizingĭetermine which part of the paper is most problematic.Plagiarism in Scientific Writing: What It Is and How to Avoid It.

Consult the following Learning Nexus articles for help with citing sources and using an appropriate reference style: If you determine that referencing previously published material and quoting the work of others are issues in your paper, you can address these problems by adding citations where needed. There are several ways to take care of duplication problems in a manuscript that has received a high similarity score. Editors must analyze the reports and use their expertise and judgment to determine if there is cause for concern.Īfter reviewing the report with a high similarity score, what should you do next? Text matches in the methods section of a manuscript may not be as concerning to editors as matches found in the results section, for example. Editors will assess the context of matched content. The human factor is key in the interpretation of similarity reports. However, an overall score of 25% with a highest single-source score of 20% more likely indicates a case of plagiarism or text-recycling (duplication of one’s own published material). A report like this isn’t likely to ring alarm bells. For example, an overall score could be 25% but the highest single-source score could be only 2%. The similarity report generates a percentage index of the amount of text matched to each source as well as an overall score that combines these percentages.

Many journals screen submitted manuscripts with the plagiarism detection software iThenticate, which uses algorithms to crawl indexed content and generate a report that highlights text that matches with text from published sources. Let’s go over some basic information about what a similarity score is and how to interpret it.Ī similarity score is an indicator of the percentage of text in a manuscript that is flagged as overlapping with published material. A high similarity score does not necessarily mean that your manuscript has plagiarism issues. You receive notice from a journal that your submitted manuscript has been run through a plagiarism detection tool and the reported similarity score is too high for the journal to proceed with review of the manuscript. Technical Issues in Publishing Addressing a Report Indicating High Similarity

Ithenticate similarity index