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The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has published guidance, in the form of a flowchart, on how to deal with suspected plagiarism. This flowchart has been adapted, with permission, to The Cochrane Collaboration’s 's editorial process. Editorial teams with a case of suspected plagiarism should follow the process outlined in the flowchart in the Figure 2. As shown in the flowchart, there is no arbitrary threshold that should be used to signify plagiarism, rather the nature of the duplicated material is as important as the incidence.
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It is good practice to ensure that the Co-ordinating Editor and Contact Editor (if used) for a review are informed in cases of overlapping text and correspondence with authors. When authors make changes in response to an editor’s Editor’s feedback, a member of the editorial team should check the revised manuscript when resubmitted to confirm the revisions are sufficient.
Figure
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. Flowchart: what to do if plagiarism is suspected
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Adapted with permission from COPE from the flowchart: “What to do if you suspect plagiarism: Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript”. |
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Recording information about cases of suspected plagiarism in Archie
Storing Similarity Check reports: Editorial teams can record similarity scores with notes of what was checked in the History section of the review workflow. If relevant, copies of similarity reports may be saved in the workflow files.
Recording actions taken: Editorial teams should consider whether to record as a note any action against an author in their Archie person record, sharing the note within their entity or with a specific administrative role. Notes should be as factual as possible, noting what has occurred and the actions taken, as opposed to judgmental. For example, it would be appropriate to write, “A paragraph of text was copied verbatim from a separate article without acknowledgement of the original text. The author was asked to explain the reason for this and make appropriate changes before resubmitting.” It would be inappropriate to write, for example, “Author often plagiarises text”.
Instances of serious plagiarism will : These will be escalated to the Editor in Chief (see 'Substantial and/or repeat instances of plagiarism'). The Editor in Chief will monitor whether cases occur with the same authors or groups of authors, and will take appropriate action.