Scientific misconduct is a serious social and economic issue, especially when it comes to medicine. According to some sources, about 90 % of biomedical research cannot be reproduced; therefore the data obtained from it cannot be used for further studies. The reasons behind it are publication bias and sloppy statistical analysis [1]. Falsification and fabrication of data are plagiarism’s companions that help to mask content matches. That is why, in compliance with the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, retraction policies are currently applied to those articles that have been proved to be falsified, fabricated or stolen [2]. Once plagiarism has been detected, a notice of retraction is issued by the editorial board informing the audience that research findings cannot be considered trustworthy.

Both absolute and relative numbers of retracted publications are pretty low: according to the research by Amos [3], in 2008–2012 PubMed contained 835 articles tagged as retracted, which amounted to only 0.02 % of the total publications submitted to this database over the specified time period. However, Wager and Williams [4] demonstrate that the number of retractions has been increasing. According to some sources, 9.8 to 17.0 % of retractions are due to plagiarism [3]. Retractions are also tracked by Retraction Watch, a blog on the Internet [5].

Plagiarism: ctrl + c, 404 error and salami

But what exactly is plagiarism in science? In short, it is appropriation of someone else’s ideas and texts without giving credit to their author. Some researchers [6] refer to the definition of plagiarism provided by the World Association of Medical Editors (we failed to find this definition on WAME website, though) and insist that the term plagiarism should be applied to a sequence of 6 or more words (no less than 30 letters in total) copied from an unnamed source. Some of Russian (Antiplagiarism) and foreign (iThenticate, CrossCheck) software used to detect matches in the submitted texts relies on calculating the percentage of copied content. However, a quantitative approach is ineffective, as plagiarism can take different shapes [7, 8].

Appropriation of someone else’s publication with almost no changes introduced to the text is the most blatant form of plagiarism. It is commonly found in the work of those researchers who write in a language that an English speaking community does not understand or who steal research works from non-English speaking authors. For example, an unauthorized English translation of an article by Olga Baydik that was first published in Russian in a non-indexed journal was later found in a Pakistani journal [7]. A study by Amos [3] shows that plagiarism is very common in the works by Chinese, Indian, Italian, Turkish or Tunisian researchers.

The most common type of plagiarism relies on plain copying and pasting pieces of information with no reference to the original source. There is a similar form of plagiarism based on the “find-replace” idea: the author replaces a few words in a borrowed fragment with his own expressions thus masking scientific misconduct. A combination of properly cited text fragments with those that have no reference to the original source represents a hybrid form of plagiarism. It creates and illusion that the author adheres to ethical guidelines.

404 Error and aggregator types of plagiarism are quite peculiar [8]. In the former case, authors copy someone else’s text and accompany it with a reference to a non-existent source or provide an inaccurate reference. In the latter case, citation is styled properly, but the source the fragment refers to does not contain the borrowed portion of the text. Usually, peer reviewers and editors make sure that original sources contain the fragments cited by the authors. Therefore, these types of plagiarism are easy to detect.

The most controversial form of plagiarism is self-plagiarism. Many researchers find it perplexing that one can steal his/ her own work. On the one hand, you really cannot steal your own ideas from yourself (the only exception here is a situation when copyrights belong to the publisher, and by copying your own work you actually steal it from the latter). On the other hand, self-plagiarism is a form of scientific misconduct when seen from the ethical perspective. First, any publication aims to convey new knowledge; recycling of a previously published text or redundant publications are frustrating to your colleagues and fail their expectations. Second, the number and quality of scientific publications determine whether a researcher will be promoted or sponsored in the future; to multiply scientific articles beyond necessity means to lie to your employer and sponsors. Third, after the research has been published, it becomes part of the public domain and may be referred to by other researchers. If you have your article re-published by another journal, its citation index will drop, and the person who will benefit from it least is you.

Often, authors seek to publish one and the same work in many languages, for example, in their native language and in English. However, the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors clearly stipulate that duplicate publication is possible only for those manuscripts that contain extremely important information concerning public health that must be promoted as widely as possible. Such work must contain a clear reference to the original source, and the journal that decides to re-publish it must obtain permission from a previous publisher.

Another trick that unscrupulous researchers resort to is salami slicing, i. e., disclosing results of one study in a series of articles in small batches, with each article discussing one or several aspects of the same study. Though such approach can be justified if the obtained data are quite extensive, most often researchers are simply driven by a desire to increase the number of publications under their names forgetting that such form of results presentation deprives readers of a chance to thoroughly and comprehensively evaluate the published work.

It may be appropriate to build your manuscript around a report delivered at a conference or to include into it a portion of data borrowed from a dissertation. However, one should be very careful here too. Style requirements for a conference report may vary depending on a conference type, and sometimes propositions and concepts must be described in such great detail that a report starts to resemble a full-fledged publication. The editors of Bulletin of RSMU have agreed to reject such manuscripts as the information they contain cannot be considered new. Very often researchers want to publish parts of their dissertation after it has been defended. It usually happens when researchers do not publish preliminary results of the research a dissertation is built around prior to dissertation defense because they already have a sufficient number of publications (though unrelated) under their name, but they still believe that the results of their work must become part of the public domain. We accept such manuscripts only if a dissertation was defended no earlier than a year ago. Since the abstract is normally available to the public and the work itself can be accessed through different online libraries, indexed and therefore referred to by other authors, we believe that it does not exhibit any scientific novelty.