Plagiarism and Journal Ethics

Plagiarism simply defined is using previously published work without properly citing the original publication in the text of a paper. It is unethical and the manner in which to deal with it has been discussed extensively by organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Since it is difficult to identify plagiarism by simply reading an article, the Editorial Board of Foot & Ankle International decided to begin screening submitted papers with plagiarism software, iThenticate, in August 2013. This software identifies passages in a paper that are identical to previously published papers. While it certainly has a significant false positive rate with portions of text, such as the list of references, it does detect plagiarism of significant portions of text. The first paper to be identified by the program for our journal found that 54% of the manuscript text was identical to previous publications with over 20% being from a single article that was not even cited by the authors. Eight additional papers were identified with significant overlap with previous publications.

Accordingly, the Editorial Board discussed plagiarism and established a policy on October 28, 2013. Effective immediately, all papers and revisions of papers submitted to Foot & Ankle International will be screened with the iThenticate plagiarism software. Those papers that are identified to potentially have significant overlap with previous publications will then be reviewed by the Editorial Board. If the paper is found to have significant duplication with previous publications, it will be rejected before review and all of the authors of the paper will receive a letter giving the reason for rejection along with the iThenticate report for the paper in question. Authors may appeal if they feel the decision was unjustified or they may revise the text to eliminate the duplicated text at which time the article can be submitted to the journal again and the article will again be analyzed with the iThenticate software. If authors wish, they can have their papers analyzed by iThenticate prior to submission at their own cost. I have appended a copy of an iThenticate report for the readers to review (available in the online version at fai.sagepub.com/supplemental). These new policies are now referenced in the instructions for authors for our journal.

Another issue arose recently about duplicate submission which is the first occurrence to our knowledge. Upon submitting an article to Foot & Ankle International, all corresponding authors must acknowledge by checking a box “Confirm that the manuscript has been submitted solely to this journal and is not published, in press, or submitted elsewhere.” A paper was under review and subsequently withdrawn 2 days before it appeared in the online edition of another journal. The Editorial Board discussed this case and unanimously agreed that this author and any subsequent authors who are found to have a duplicate submission will be barred from submitting any papers for 1 year from the time of discovery of the duplicate submission.

Foot & Ankle International is committed to the highest journalistic standards and ethics. Hopefully the above examples are aberrations, but we have now developed the above policies to deal with any future infractions.

David B. Thordarson, MDEditor in ChiefFoot & Ankle International