Internet Journal of Medical Update. 2019 January;14(1):1-4. doi: 10.4314/ijmu.v14i1.1 Internet Journal of Medical Update Journal home page: http://www.akspublication.com/ijmu Editorial 1 Copyrighted © by Dr. Arun Kumar Agnihotri. All rights reserved | DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ijmu.v14i1.1 Plagiarism Vipul D Yagnik Director and Consultant Surgical Gastroenterologist, Nishtha Surgical Hospital and Research, Patan, Gujarat, India “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” T.S. Eliot Plagiarism is a universal phenomenon and its scope includes not only biomedical writing but also other fields of literature. It is not a legal term, and various authorities define it differently. The word comes from plagiarius, which means “kidnapper” in Latin; cognate with the Greek adjectives plagios that means “crooked” or “treacherous. Ben Jonson has been credited by the Oxford Dictionary as being the first to use this word in print 1 . Additionally, the first English copyright law was passed in 1709 1 . The Oxford University website defines plagiarism as “presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement” 2 . Plagiarism is a frequent and severe form of research misconduct that is often a result of lack of time, lack of energy to do work by yourself, poor research skill, poor mentorship (because the researcher thinks that the mentor will either not notice nor care), poor citation skill, lack of understanding of the English language or, gaining tenure, or increasing professional stature 3 . It not only is a matter of professional misconduct but also has legal implications. Plagiarism is typically practiced to improve one’s personal position or for one’s personal gain. Plagiarism involves either the unauthorized use of someone else’s data or language 4 . In either situation, researchers may be dishonest, and editors or reviewers may even suspect fraudulence 4 . Plagiarism has two components: 1) using another's text, images, words, etc., without permission, and 2) passing it off as one’s own. Based on the feedback received from 879 teachers, Internet-based American commercial plagiarism- detection service Turnitin identifies ten types of plagiarism 5 . The most common is “clone,” or “copy-paste”: submitting someone else’s work, word-for-word, as one’s own without acknowledgment. The least common is “re-tweet,” in which case the paper has proper citations but relies heavily on others’ work 5 . Below is a discussion of other forms of plagiarism. Self-plagiarism is when an author uses his or her own previously published work for subsequent publication as a brand new work. Self-plagiarism appears to be an oxymoron as it sounds practically impossible to steal from one’s own work. Roig mentioned that an individual commits self- plagiarism when republishing the same paper, publishing valuable content from the previously published work or publishing a small portion of previously published work 6 . According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME), the following conditions are exempted from self-plagiarism 7 : • The secondary version faithfully reflects the data and interpretations of the original text. • The editors of both journals are aware in advance the author wishes to publish one or more translations. • The primary publisher has given permission for other language version to be published. Duplicate publication means publishing the same scientific material more than once, by the author or publisher. It differs from plagiarism which is when some authors performs republication 8 . Duplicate publication is a research misconduct. However, dual publication is okay (publishing same paper in a different language with prior permission from the previous publisher and with acknowledgement). Professor Raveenthiran V expressed his views on duplicate publication on World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) listserver discussion on April 7, 2013 9 . He identified the problem with duplicate publications as copyright violation, wasting the precious time of reviewers and editors, affecting meta-analysis, pseudo-inflation of Curriculum Vitae (CV), wastage of printing resources, pollution of science