Response to “The ethics of scholarly publishing: exploring differences in plagiarism and duplicate publication across nations”

The report on ethics of scholarly publishing by Kathleen Amos is very interesting 1. She noted that “Unethical publishing practices cut across nations.” In fact, misconduct can be seen in any country around the world. The high prevalence of problems in some countries can be due to several reasons, including (a) the system to check for misconduct, (b) the size of countries and number of medical scientists in those countries, and (c) the basic perception of misconduct in each country.

The picture might be clearer if it were possible to assess the incidence of misconduct per number of medical scientists in each country. In addition, the translational plagiarism seen in some countries where English is not a native language (such as Thailand) cannot be easily detected 2. As Steen et al. recently noted, “behavior of both authors and institutions” is the main factor determining occurrence of misconduct 3. The active role of medical librarians to fight misconduct, such as notification of cases via an international medical librarian society, might be useful for decreasing the magnitude of the problem worldwide.