Plagiarism in Biomedical Research

Ovchinnikov Dmitrii Valer'evich PhD in Medicine Head of Department (organization of scientific work and training of scientific and pedagogical personnel), Military Medical Academy 194404, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Akademika Lebedeva str., 6 dv.ovchinnikov-vma@yandex.ru Other publications by this author     Chernyavskii Evgenii Aleksandrovich Adjunct, Research Center, Military Medical Academy 194044, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Akademika Lebedeva str., 6 vmeda_37@mil.ru Other publications by this author

Yatmanov Aleksei Nikolaevich PhD in Medicine Postgraduate student, Military Medical Academy 194044, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Akademika Lebedeva str., 6 yan20220@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Previously published in Russian in the journal Pedagogy and Education.

Information technology has advanced far beyond what was possible a few years ago. The global Internet allows anyone to access a huge amount of information that was once quite hard to find and access. This article will focus on the use of research literature, which is now freely available through online libraries, various scientific journals, and e-library resources like PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Elsevier, and many others.

In May 2010, the popular men's magazine Esquire posted exactly the same text on the same page thrice. It wasn't a layout error. The text was copied by the now well-known Copy-Paste method and described the history of the appearance of this functionality: "In 1974, an employee of Xerox, Larry Tesler, working on the creation of a computer text editor for the American publishing house Ginn and Company, changed the program interface for moving text fragments. He reduced the number of manipulations from six to two and assigned the names cut-paste and copy-paste to the operations, borrowing these terms from the practice of traditional paper layout. Evil tongues claim that thereby he laid the foundations of all modern journalism" ^[8].

Unfortunately, today, it is evident that the problem of "copy-paste" has affected not only journalism but also the sphere of scientific publications. Of course, it is more ethical than legal in nature. One of the vectors for solving the problem is the organization and control of the originality of scientific texts. In particular, an important milestone on this path was the Decision of the Higher Attestation Commission under the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation No. 1-pl/1 dated June 15, 2017, paragraph 4.3.1, which recommends “organizations and founders of publications included in the list of Higher Attestation Commission... ensure, from January 1, 2018, the verification of manuscripts submitted for publication for the presence of illegal borrowings" ^[12].

It would seem that if there are systems for detecting text borrowings, such as "Anti-Plagiarism," the problem should be solved. But, as practice shows, the only criterion by which the originality of a work is evaluated is the achievement of the maximum "percentage of originality." It turns out that plagiarism is permissible, but in small volumes: do not exceed the established norm, and everything will be fine ^[8].

In practice, this approach leads to a shift in goals: the author sees their main task as "passing the anti-plagiarism" test to achieve the required percentage. The author's efforts are aimed at rewriting (paraphrasing) borrowed fragments and technical workarounds and introducing uninformative parts into the text that do not carry a significant semantic load to increase the percentage of originality. It is obvious that the question of the quality of a scientific article falls by the wayside. To avoid such substitution, it is necessary to clearly formulate the requirements for the originality of the submitted manuscripts, and the main requirement should be the absence of illegal borrowings, i.e., "unreasonable borrowings of someone else's text for the purposes of quoting without specifying (referring) to the true author and source of borrowing" ^[5].

We are sure that everyone who is engaged in educational or scientific activities has heard about the Anti-Plagiarism system. Nevertheless, I would like to run through all the concepts concerning this system in a thesis. So, what is Anti-Plagiarism? This is a system for identifying illegal borrowings from open sources on the Internet and other sources. In simple words, Anti-Plagiarism is a website that helps determine the independence of a text. The result of checking the Anti-Plagiarism system is a report that displays the main characteristics of the text analysis performed. At the end of the text verification, we receive a report in which four main indicators are expressed as a percentage.

The first indicator is borrowing. This shows how much text has been copied from other sources already published on the Internet.

The second indicator is self-citation. Fragments that match or almost match the source text, the author or co-author of which is the author of the document being checked. This shows the percentage of text that has already been published by the author in other articles or documents on the Internet.

The third indicator is the percentage of citations. It shows how much of the verified text is a quote from official sources (the Constitution, federal laws, criminal, civil, family, and other codes).

Finally, perhaps the most important indicator is the originality percentage. The system shows what percentage of the text is written independently (i.e., does it overlap with texts on the Internet).

After checking the work for plagiarism, it becomes clear which text was written by the author personally (the original text), which author downloaded the text via the Internet (borrowing), and which text was taken from official sources, as well as links to their own already published works (self-citation).

Due to the fact that in many countries, the quality and quantity of scientific publications are the basis of the system of evaluating the effectiveness and encouraging scientists and unscrupulous researchers fighting for work and funding to use other people's texts or ideas in their works and repeatedly publish their own results, taking advantage of a large volume of daily published research, makes the task of detecting plagiarism and self-plagiarism extremely difficult ^[8]. The problem of unethical behavior in science is especially acute in medicine. According to some estimates, reproducibility studies of the best works in the field of preclinical and fundamental biomedicine have reproducibility coefficients of <25%. In comparison, the results of 90% of biomedical studies are not reproducible, which is associated with incorrect statistical analysis and distortion of published data ^[12]. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism are closely related to the fabrication and falsification of data, as they allow you to hide borrowing. Researchers note a tendency to increase the number of articles withdrawn from journals due to violations of scientific ethics, while plagiarism accounts for 9.8% of reviews and self-plagiarism—14.2% ^[5]. This makes the problem of controlling the originality of biomedical research urgent.

This work aims to consider the problems of antiplagiarism in biomedical research. To achieve this, methods of analysis and synthesis of scientific publications and literary sources on the topic under study were used.

The specifics of biomedical research

Biomedical research involves animals or humans and is conducted to study methods and means of treatment, diagnosis, and/or the prevention and acquisition of new knowledge in psychology and physiology in conditions of pathology, standard, and extreme situations ^[10]. Biomedical research can either serve the interests of a particular participant or be carried out without direct benefit to the person taking part in the study.

Due to the emergence of new technologies, drugs, diagnostic procedures, and medical devices and the ever-increasing scale, importance, and economic demand for biomedical research, the concern of the general public about the likely psychological, moral, social, and financial consequences of the data obtained in these studies is increasing. Great importance is attached to the observance of basic ethical principles at the planning and implementation stages of projects involving animals and humans as research participants. Legal and ethical regulation of biomedical research is carried out by the following main international documents ^[3]:

1. Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UNESCO, 2005).

2. Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (EU, 1997).

3. International Ethical Guidelines for Human Health Research (SMNMO, 2016).

4. Helsinki Declaration "Recommendations for doctors involved in Biomedical research on humans" (VMA, 1964, ed. 2004).

5. Practical recommendations of the Ethics Commission for the review of Biomedical Research (WHO, 2000).

6. The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Rules for the Protection of a Person, the subject of Research (1978).

7. International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research with Human Involvement (CIOMS, 1993).

Strict legal regulation of biomedical research is associated with uncertainty, poor predictability, and sometimes the unpredictability of their results ^[9]. As a result, before introducing new methods and methods of conducting medical research on humans, it is necessary to monitor the use of technologies, conduct a sufficient number of examinations, identify adverse reactions, and take other possible precautions, taking into account the study of possible risks. Also, when planning and conducting biomedical research, the following basic principles should be taken into account ^[11]:

1. The principle of respect for the individual includes two requirements:

·Respect for the autonomy of individuals capable of independent choice and decision-making;

· Protection of persons with limited autonomy, that is, to a certain extent dependent on others or particularly vulnerable, from various forms of harm and other abuse.

2. The principle of good, consisting of rules:

·Not causing harm;

·The need to minimize possible harm and achieve the greatest possible benefit.

3. The principle of justice, including the following concepts:

·Distributive justice, meaning an honest distribution of the hardships and benefits of research;

·Compensatory justice, which assumes that subjects who have suffered in any way during participation in the study deserve adequate compensation;

·Fairness as reciprocity, according to which research participants deserve a certain reward after completion, as useful and socially significant results were obtained due to their risk and hardships experienced.

Features of plagiarism in scientific research

Regular scientific work implies the obligation to obtain new knowledge and facts, which are always based on previous results, and it causes scientists to be adequately informed about early research and development. This implies the inclusion of used scientific publications in the list of cited literature ^[1]. Biomedical research conducted on humans is characterized by increased complexity associated not only with the specifics of the research process itself but also with the need to plan and act, considering multiple ethical and legal regulators. As a result, the value of each study is significantly increased, as the results obtained allow other scientific research groups to rely on existing data. However, the problem of the prevalence of plagiarism in biomedical research makes it challenging to use their results in further research, which slows down the development of the entire industry.

Plagiarism is the borrowing of texts and ideas of other people without indicating their authorship ^[7]. According to a number of researchers, plagiarism can be considered six or more words, including from 30 letters, which are arranged sequentially and borrowed without specifying the source. The following types of plagiarism are distinguished, differing in prevalence but having the same degree of "severity" ^[6]:

1. Plagiarism of ideas. The most difficult-to-determine variant of plagiarism is characterized by extreme seriousness, in which the idea or concept of the research is borrowed.

2. Direct plagiarism. This is copying part of the text from any source without correctly quoting its author, that is, the presence of a link to the original source with the conclusion of the quoted fragment in quotation marks. This kind of plagiarism has become especially relevant in the era of information technologies that allow quick access to a huge array of relevant texts. Regardless of the type of articles, authors of publications are allowed to reasonably borrow no more than 10% of the text.

3. Mosaic plagiarism. This implies borrowing an idea from the original source by verbatim quoting several phrases or words without specifying the true author. At the same time, the plagiarist combines their own opinions and ideas with borrowed ones, receiving a stolen fragment of the text characterized by the logical complexity of the presentation. This type of borrowing is one of the most common.

4. Borrowing established terms and illustrations. This occurs when the author needs to insert well-established definitions and classifications, significant in volume, or previously published illustrations into the text of the study. In the first case, the author needs permission from the editors, and in the second, the copyright holder of the image and the publisher.

5. Self-plagiarism. This involves borrowing a significant amount of previously published data and statements of the author of the study without indicating the fact of publication. Self-borrowing can be presented in several ways:

· Submission of an article for consideration simultaneously in several publications, leading to redundancy of publications;

· Salami slicing, in which the author, instead of publishing the results of a full-fledged study, divides it into several fragments and prints the data in parts, trying to multiply the number of publications;

· Translation of the published article into another language.

We should also mention such types of borrowings as "aggregator" and "error 404" ^[4]. In the first case, the authors correctly refer to an existing work, which, in fact, does not contain information indicated as borrowed, and in the second, they use someone else's ideas or text, referring to a non-existent work or incorrectly referring to a real work. Usually, such fraud is easily detected by reviewers and editors when checking the compliance of the content of articles to which the authors make references.

Appropriate rules and requirements for authors have been introduced to combat plagiarism in scientific research based on formal criteria, such as the percentage of uniqueness in the anti-plagiarism system (most often at least 80%) ^[2]. At the same time, because anti-plagiarism systems based on a formal mechanistic approach do not analyze the meaning of the text being checked, "overdiagnosis" occurs, in which everyday speech and stylistic turns are marked as borrowings ^[3]. In the absence of a critical approach to the conclusions of such systems, the writing of biomedical research, already characterized by considerable complexity, becomes even more complicated. The current situation requires the development of clearer and more adequate criteria for the originality of publications.

Conclusion

Plagiarism in biomedical research is a serious violation of research and publication ethics, which, if intentionally committed, leads to the discrediting of science and scientists and the illegality of research activities. The use of borrowings undermines the authenticity of scientific papers and journals publishing them, threatens the unity of the scientific process and society's attitude toward science, and violates the literary rights of the authors of original texts and the property rights of copyright holders. Plagiarism can cause material, reputational, and moral harm to authors, such as public disclosure of data, loss of funding for research, difficulties in the professional growth of the authors of the article or the completion of research work, and, in some cases, is a crime and leads to litigation.