A plagiarism paperdemic: determining plagiarism among COVID-19 articles in infectious disease journals between 2020 and 2021

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has caused drastic changes in the publishing framework which allowed for the quick review and rapid publication of manuscripts in order to quickly share vital information about this new viral pandemic to the general public and scientists. Alarms have been raised for the potential for misconduct in COVID-19 research. The purpose of this study is to determine the presence of plagiarism in COVID-19 papers across infectious disease journals. Methods COVID-19 related research and review articles published in infectious disease journals were collected. Each manuscript was optimized and uploaded to Turnitin, which is a similarity checking tool. Similarity reports were manually checked for events of true plagiarism using an 80% threshold, performed via human judgment. Results In this cross-sectional study, 41.61% ( n = 129) of manuscripts were deemed plagiarized out of a total of 310 papers that were analyzed. Plagiarism was identified in 35.07% of reviews ( n = 47), and 46.6% of original research ( n = 82). Among the plagiarized papers, the median number of copied sentences was 3 IQR 4. The highest recorded similarity report was 60%, and the highest number of copied sentences was 85. The discussion section of these articles was the most problematic area, with the average number of copied sentences in that section being 6.25 ± 10.16. The average time to judge all manuscripts was 2.45 ± 3.09 min. Among all the plagiarized papers, 72.09% belonged to papers where the similarity report was ≤ 15% ( n = 93). No significant differences were found with regards to plagiarism events among the quartiles. Conclusions Plagiarism is prevalent in COVID-19 publications. All similarity reports should be supplemented with human judgment.