Editor's message: sufficient details in a manuscript, originality, and similarity score

Abstract

There is no doubt about the value of multimedia and other resources for sharing the advances in the sciences and the arts of a given discipline. They help to grow awareness and interest in different topics, as a sense of what sounds reasonable and what does not. Good quality of the information is essential, as the aim of most journals expresses openly their commitment to being a reliable and trustful source for presenting confirmed advances and findings, validated enough to be a support for building criteria or as a foundation of further research. The information published in the journals is generated by the authors and there are several mechanisms, mostly derived from the scientific method, to ensure as possible that the information that is collected with the intention to be communicated fulfills the mentioned requirements. Peer review of the submitted material is a key element, it is often double-blind performed, seeking to be sure that feedback and criticism responses are included in the manuscript and eventually are available to the readers. Revision of the material does not finish after publication, indeed there is a post review conducted by the readers and those that take the information as the base for their own research. Authors and journals are under continuous evaluation by the readers, some of them will confirm or reject the worthiness of the published material and apply their results or submit new manuscripts that follow the same process, so that finally converge, more than agree, and the conclusion will result in new knowledge. Among the criteria for accepting a paper is the originality, and a sort of tool for evaluating it is known as the ‘Similarity score’, which is the ratio, expressed in percentage, of text in a paper that is found in other sources. This score is becoming one of the acceptance criteria by some journals, as some scoring engines are referred to as plagiarism finders. A high similarity score raises suspicion of plagiarism, which is not, and must not be tolerated, however, other aspects might be considered before concluding about unethical behavior. There are many reports suggesting the maximum acceptable score of similarity, some admit 15% while others consider up to 25%. If this score means plagiarism by itself, then the admissible score must be 0%. However, a fair review must consider other factors that affect this score and that must be pondered with the request of submission. For instance, it is asked to the authors of manuscripts dealing with the derivation of methods that the framework of assumptions is described and justified in detail. In this case, the contribution of the description to the score could be irrelevant, while it is expected that the justification is not a repetition of something found somewhere else. It is understandable that having concerns about the score might be against the request for sufficient information for duplicating the results. Therefore, a probable explanation for scores higher than the admissible ones, maybe around 30%, could be the excess of details and failure when summarizing material already