Role of the Editor in Limiting Plagiarism or Similarity in Scholarly Journal Manuscripts

Abstract

This brief communication is the outcome of the prevailing confusion and the role of editors of several prestigious journals published in India in different disciplines of science and social science including the discipline of library and information science. These journals use different Plagiarism Detection Tools (PDTs) or Plagiarism Detection Software (PDS) to assess the similarity score of the submitted manuscript. These PDTs are helpful to avoid questions raised on the academic integrity of the submitted manuscript. For every submission, the editor of the journal generates a similarity report and communicates the results of the similarity index to the scholars verbatim. It is not judicious for the editor of the journal to simply rely on the percentage of similarity index suggested by the PDT. Human intervention is required to rule out the facts by a thorough inspection of every single matching. Also, an acceptable percentage of similarity for a manuscript needs a critical analysis. Based on the set guidelines of the academic regulatory bodies, an acceptable percentage of similarity for a manuscript is considered as minor or level 0 if it is 10%. The present communication draws attention towards this malice as a lot of time of the author/scholar is devoted to incorporate small changes which do not serve any useful purpose to the manuscript and the journal.