Letter to the Editor: Plagiarism and Journal Editing

Sir, the recent article on “Plagiarism in Scientific Publishing” by Masic is very interesting. Masic described cases of plagiarism and concluded that “There is a dilemma: who, on what basis (criteria, standards, rules), when and how should declare someone a plagiarist” and also mentioned for the importance of informatics tool to determine plagiarism. Indeed, it is the role of the journal and its editor to detect the plagiarism. Several online plagiarism detections tool can be selected. The concern is on the reliability and accuracy of those tools. Furthermore, the “ability” to detect is another important thing to be considered. Some kinds of plagiarism such as figure plagiarism, with or without modification, cannot be simply detected by present plagiarism detection tools. Furthermore, it should be noted that if the plagiarized work is not available as a computational copy, the computational tool will becomes useless. The strong reviewers of the journal will help fulfill this gap. Also, the detection is primarily for determining the existence of plagiarism but it cannot tell who perform that plagiarism. In some cases, more in depth IT tracing back to determine the plagiarist who might be the third party is required.