Decoding Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty in Plastic Surgery

“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”

—William Shakespeare

The purpose of peer-reviewed research is to advance our specialty via an enduring scientific “Hansard” in the form of medical journals. To this end, ensuring academic fidelity of published works is of paramount importance. Regrettably, despite consequences for authors, data falsification, data fabrication, plagiarism, and duplicate publication are problems journals must remain vigilant towards.^1–3 These offences result in significant professionalism breaches such as theft, cheating, misrepresentation, and fraud which create doubt in the eyes of the journal's stakeholders as to the quality of the journal. ² Herein we will define these various aspects of academic dishonesty and the steps the editorial team of Plastic Surgery are taking to ensure publication integrity.

Data fabrication and falsification are easily defined as either making up or manipulating data or results. ³ Plagiarism is taking the words, results, analyses, innovations, and/or ideas of others without offering credit to the original source and misrepresenting that work as of their own.^1–3 Duplicate publication is a form of “self-plagiarism” where an author reuses aspects of their own work either directly or without obtaining permission to reproduce it.^1,2,4 Historically, Plastic Surgery would rely on our reviewers to identify these breaches during the peer-review process and bring concerns forward to the editor(s). In the postpublication phase, it is encouraging that journals rarely have to issue retractions or withdrawals of published works, which are mainly due to duplication, plagiarism, lack of permission, or at the author's request. ⁵

Although technology has been slow to disrupt medicine other than at the periphery, it has come to the aid of journal editorial teams in the form of plagiarism and duplicate publication detection software. Regrettably this software can do little to protect against data fabrication and falsification. There are many vendors that produce this type of software ⁴ and since January, 2021 Plastic Surgery has elected to screen every submitted manuscript via Similarity Check provided by Crossref and powered by iThenticate. ⁶ This service is embedded within our publisher's online manuscript submission and peer-review platform and instantly produces a report highlighting potential published matches and indicating what percentage of the paper overlaps with other works via a similarity index. We value and are mindful of our section editors and reviewers time and therefore employ this screen before initiating the formal peer-review process.

It is true that some degree of similarity is acceptable ¹ and some editors/authors have defined what “similarity index” cut-off is reasonable.^1,3,7 There is detective work required despite the software as it is a sensitive tool although not specific, and cannot screen figures and/or tables. ³ For example, if an abstract is published from a conference's proceedings, it will be flagged as plagiarized, therefore a degree of editorial pragmatism is requisite. The editorial team at Plastic Surgery have identified some red flags in this process such as a similarity index score of >20%, determination of whether a reference was provided or if a direct passage was placed within quotation marks in the submitted work, where in the article the similarity was located (eg, methods vs discussion), the type of article submitted (eg, systematic review vs original article), whether the author(s) included a disclosure of previous publication (including preprint) at the time of submission, and/or if written permission was obtained for inclusion of the similar (or same) work.^1–3

The editorial team will review both the quality and quantity of a plagiarized or duplicated submission before making a decision of whether or not to send the manuscript for further peer review and authors may well have their article “desk” rejected without formal review. Repeat offenders will receive direct communication and/or have their academic institution notified. Corrigenda, retractions, and/or editorial statements of concern may be required if awareness of academic dishonesty are made postpublication. ³

We are privileged to be custodians of Plastic Surgery and it therefore behoves us to decode plagiarism and academic dishonesty from submitted manuscripts to the best of our ability so as to ensure that the legacy of our journal remains rich.