Publication Integrity: Case Discussion

This panel will include brief presentation how different stakeholders (editors, publishers, reviewers, research organizations, funding bodies) deal with publication misconduct and how they ensure the integrity of the published record. The session will be based on actual cases from real life and the participants will be invited to share their opinion. Guidance from international organizations, such as COPE, will be presented.

What is publication integrity?

Speaker: Ana Marušić

This introductory part will describe how editors ensure the integrity of the published record and present some tools and best practices, such as those from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

Text similarity and plagiarism detection in scholarly journals

Speaker: Ksenija Baždarić

This part of the session will be considering detection of plagiarism in scholarly journals. I will first give a conceptual framework of plagiarism in science and an overview of different tools for detecting text similarity/plagiarism (iThenticate, Turnitin, WCopyfind and other similarity tools). The second part is practical, the process of decision making in text similarity screening and plagiarism detection (cut-off values and flowcharts).

Publication integrity in the COVID era

Speaker: Vedran Katavić

The attention of the interested public to scientific COVID-related news, as well as their concern about being able to follow evidence-based guidelines, have rarely been so piqued as in the recent pandemic. While research into the biology and epidemiology of the virus/disease are still ongoing, a significant number of research papers have already been retracted from the public record. In the general public, these retractions have garnered more interest than any breaches of responsible conduct of research (RCR ) in the recent decades.

In this session I will try to quantify these retractions, argue that publication ethics has a key role in maintaining public trust in the scientific endeavor, and give a few key examples of COVID-related publications that have been retracted.