Be careful! Avoiding duplication: a case study

In recent years we have published many papers discussing how to avoid duplication (plagiarism) in scientific journals (Lin et al., 2009; 2011; Zhang, 2010a; 2010b; Zhang and Jia, 2012; 2013; Zhang and McIntosh, 2012; Jia and Zhang, 2013; Jia et al., 2013; Tan and Zhang, 2013). Indeed, to prevent plagiarism in scientific publishing, various detecting tools have been widely applied, such as CrossCheck, Turnitin, eBlast and AMLC (academic misconduct literature check) system of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). In recent years, many journals have provided their explicit policies on this issue. For example, on Elsevier’s website there are detailed instructions entitled “For Editors: Questions and Answers on Policies” (http://www.elsevier.com/ editors/perk/questions-and-answers), and also on our own journals’ website (http://www.zju.edu.cn), there is “Instruction for Authors” that clearly states that we use “CrossCheck to fight against plagiarism and to ensure high ethical standards for all of the submitted papers”. In short, as Meddings (2010) exclaims, “Credit where credit’s due: plagiarism screening in scholarly publishing”. Stopping plagiarism is the journal editors’ responsibility (Zhang and McIntosh, 2012).