Plagiarism detection in manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Surgical Sciences between 2020 and 2021: a case study

The aim of this study was to share our experience with plagiarism detection in manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Surgical Sciences, a Romania-based medical journal, between 2020 and 2021. We analyzed similarity score reports from 200 articles submitted consecutively for publication between 2020 and 2021 generated by PlagScan, a software tool for plagiarism detection. The similarity score ranged from 0% to 92.4%, and 45 articles presented scores over 25.0%. According to PlagScan’s results, more than half of the submitted articles had a similarity score of more than 10% and one-third of them had a similarity score above 20%. Among submitted manuscripts with a similarity score of less than 20%, a larger proportion of the original research and review manuscripts than case reports used more than 10 sources. All articles with a similarity score below 20% were evaluated qualitatively before the final decision of rejection.