
Nor does iThenticate exclude title pages, affiliations, funding statements, disclosures, and acknowledgements, where original text is less important. Moreover, although iThenticate can be set to ignore the bibliography and quotations, it does not always do so. Indeed, both the Committee on Publication Ethics and the US Office of Research Integrity note that some degree of copying in this context is often legitimate. iThenticate does not analyze different sections of a given manuscript (e.g., abstract and introduction), an important limitation given that some sections of manuscripts by the same group will have legitimate overlap, e.g., in the “ Methods” section. However, the use of iThenticate for plagiarism detection has significant limitations. Consequently, their software, iThenticate, formerly called CrossCheck and also powering Similarity Check by Crossref, boasts that it can “prevent misconduct by comparing manuscripts against its database of over 60 billion web pages and 155 million content items, including 49 million works from more than 600 scholarly publisher participants”.
#Ithenticate cost software
Although several commercial plagiarism detection software packages exist, the majority of US publishers allow the company Turnitin to access their database of published articles. Now, due to efficient search engines, online publishing, and software algorithms, journals increasingly utilize software that can efficiently scan thousands of manuscripts in seconds, matching submitted text to already published text. In the past, editorial offices have essentially relied upon chance detection by reviewers or editors to discover that submitted work had been previously published. However, doing so places a difficult burden on editors and publishers, only partially mitigated by existing informatics approaches designed to detect plagiarism. It is crucial that unacceptable copying be detected to preserve the integrity of the scientific literature. Plagiarism is a chronic and troublesome issue for scientific journals. The use of commercial plagiarism detection software can be optimized by selecting a cutoff score that reflects desired sensitivity and specificity. Plagiarism was a common occurrence among manuscripts submitted for publication to a major American specialty medical journal and most manuscripts with plagiarized material were submitted from countries in which English was not an official language. The cutoff score maximizing both sensitivity and specificity was 15 % (sensitivity 84.8 % and specificity 80.5 %). Using the most commonly employed commercial plagiarism detection software, sensitivity and specificity were studied with regard to the generated plagiarism score. In 400 consecutively submitted manuscripts, 17 % of submissions contained unacceptable levels of plagiarized material with 82 % of plagiarized manuscripts submitted from countries where English was not an official language. Commercial plagiarism detection software was utilized and its use was optimized. We manually curated submitted manuscripts and deemed an article contained plagiarism if one sentence had 80 % of the words copied from another published paper. In this study, the extent of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to a major specialty medical journal was documented. However, its detection is time consuming and difficult, presenting challenges to editors and publishers who are entrusted with ensuring the integrity of published literature. Plagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature.
