A brief review of plagiarism in medical scientific research papers

Historical overview The term known as “plagiarism” was first coined in English around the year 1601 by the dramatist Ben Jonson, in order to characterize someone committing theft in literary (1(. Plagiarism itself has a long life history. There are countless plagiarism cases in almost every specialty in science. In astronomy, David King (a British professor of the history of science) noticed that most theories and models proposed by the famous Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in his famous book (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) were virtually adopted from Arab scientist, Ibn-Elshatir’s book (2,3). Writing reports and articles about plagiarism dates to late 1800s when the Abstract Plagiarism refers to “adopting someone else’s words, work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own”. It is potentially considered as the most prevalent form of scientific dishonesty discovered in research papers. The present review aims to provide a thorough account of plagiarism to build awareness about all dimensions of plagiarism.The key words “plagiarism”, “types”, “detection” and “consequences” have been applied to retrieve the articles from electronic references such as MEDLINE database. Around five hundred articles have been retrieved. The articles have been subdivided, each group encompassed a dimension of plagiarism. The major findings and updates have been summarized for each topic. The most important reason behind plagiarism as spotted is lack of knowledge about the subject. And when the researchers are trapped with deficient time, in experienced writing skills and the pressure in order get their work published in some decent journals, the authors surreptitiously take access others’ work and commit plagiarism. Before, detecting plagiarism used to be difficult; however, in recent years, the journals have devised many plagiarism-detection services and software programs. The current article provides the details on how the journals use these services and software tool to effectively check for plagiarism in submitted manuscripts. In academic settings, plagiarism is a potential devastating offense. Plagiarism is taken as the most common problem in research writing. The most critical way to curb it is to build up awareness about how to cope with this ever increasing problem known as research misconduct.