Editorial Accidental similarity

The University of Oxford defines plagiarism as: “presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by in- corporating it into your work without full acknowledgement.”[1] There are various types of plagiarism, ranging from subtle (e.g. presenting others’ideas) to the not-so-subtle (e.g. presenting others’work), but in essence it means passing offsomeone else’s work or ideas as your own. Most authors will agree that this is wrong, however, understanding the exact nature of plagiarism can often be tricky in environments where core research method knowledge lacks. With the internet of today providing so many more sources to cite from compared to years gone by, keeping track of similarity without a good similarity checker is often impossible. The vast majority of plagiarism cases I have had to deal with tend to be due to ignorance, rather than purpose (as a result I prefer the term similarity where copying was unintentional and plagiarism where there was clear signs of intent). Pre-publication, this requires a simple noti- fication of the similarity score to the authors so that they can make amendments and correct identified sections of similarity. Within our journal flow, similarity is only checked once on initial submission. I suspect many other journals will reject a paper with high similarity, however, we have found that in most cases authors simply weren’t aware that what they did could be considered plagiarism. Resultantly, we take a more supportive approach and rarely reject a paper based on an initially high similarity score