The dictionary defines plagiarism as “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.” Plagiarism can occur in many industries, including new product design, novel writing, and not to mention, the publication of scientific research. Nowadays, there is an abundance of publications across every scientific discipline, and as the predominant publication language is English, this can lead to a significant problem—plagiarism. In many so-called plagiarism cases in scientific publications by non-English speaking authors, the authors did not take someone else’s work or ideas and passed them off as their own, but simply used the popularly used English expressions or jargons due to their unproficient English. However, using someone else’s text without attribution is also plagiarism. Unintentional borrowing even a sentence or two can have serious consequences.
With the advent of new plagiarism-checking software, most SCI journals now integrate plagiarism checks into their publication processes. If a similarity index from a plagiarism check on a manuscript is excessively high, the manuscript may not be considered for peer review, even if authors used same expressions from their previous publications – self-plagiarism.
For a productive non-English-speaking author, attempting to rewrite large manuscript sections to avoid self-plagiarism can be challenging, and such revisions may introduce grammatical errors. When English copyediting services are sought afterward, like those provided by BioMed Proofreading, assigned editors correct these errors to accurately convey the authors’ intended meaning. However, this correction may inadvertently increase the similarity index. How? Here is an example. One of our existing clients wrote a new manuscript. There are many sentences and paragraphs in this manuscript that were repeated from her previous publications – self-plagiarism. She tried to rewrite those parts as much as possible to reduce the similarity, but the similarity index was still 29% after her rewriting. She sought our editing service (but declined the paraphrasing service) and hoped that the similarity index could be reduced after our copyediting. However, the index contrariously rose to 31% after our editing. The reason is that her previously published articles had been edited by our native English-speaking editors. Her revisions of those published sentences and paragraphs led to the introduction of grammatical problems in the new manuscript. Our editor corrected those errors during copy editing and inevitably changed some of them to the previous versions, leading to an increase in the similarity.
Paraphrasing or rewriting is a way of employing different sentence structures, words and phrases to express the same ideas, offers an alternative to using direct quotations and allows you to integrate source materials into your assignments to avoid plagiarism. Rewriting or paraphrasing is more time-consuming and challenging than writing and copyediting, even for native English-speaking editors and writers. Therefore, as an English copyediting and rewriting service company, we recommend that non-English-speaking authors avoid rewriting their manuscripts with a high similarity index. Instead, we advise allowing our professional English editors and writers to paraphrase their manuscripts professionally and academically.
