Seen this before: Early detection of research plagiarism
Plagiarism — the passing off of other people’s work or ideas as your own — has become significantly easier since the development of the Internet, but so has plagiarism detection. Thomson Reuters now offers journal publishers a tool that checks submitted manuscripts against databases of previously published work.
A recent high profile case in the United Kingdom highlighted how plagiarism is usually only detected once the damage is done. Dr Raj Persaud is one of the UK's best known psychiatrists and a frequent contributor to UK television and radio programs on mental health. At a hearing of the General Medical Council in June, Dr Persaud admitted using plagiarized material in a book and in articles for newspapers and medical journals. Whether this was deliberate or accidental plagiarism, its discovery led to a messy fallout for all concerned — Dr Persaud, the researchers who claimed their work had not been correctly attributed, and the editors and publishers of the plagiarized materials. For example, the British Medical Journal was forced to issue a formal retraction in 2005 after publishing an article by Dr Persaud in which he failed to attribute his work correctly.
Detection of plagiarism early on in the submission and peer review process could save publishers a lot of pain. Thomson Reuters is now offering editors a new tool — iThenticate — that checks submitted manuscripts for potential copy-catting against databases of previously published work.
According to Logan Hutchinson, a product manager in the Scientific business at Thomson Reuters, iThenticate will reduce research integrity violations and plagiarism by using technology to point editorial staff members in the direction of such infractions. "It's meant to provide a body of evidence," Hutchinson said.
The iThenticate tool will be offered as part of Manuscript Central, the Thomson Reuters peer review and online manuscript submission. iThenticate will digitally search, or crawl, the text of submitted manuscripts, comparing it to existing manuscripts stored in publisher-stocked databases, such as CrossCheck, or to public libraries of papers, such as PubMed. Searching the public-facing Internet as well as CrossCheck will help the program to flag more fingerprinted passages that show similarity to published papers that editors can check to see if plagiarism has occurred.
iThenticate will be fully integrated into Manuscript Central during 2009, with the CrossCheck database set to come online this June. Journals that employ Manuscript Central, and are therefore set to take advantage of iThenticate, include the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Chemical Society and Oxford University Press families of publications, and journals published by Blackwell Publishing such as Acta Zoologica, Clinical Genetics and Marine Ecology.