Is there a difference of similarity value during CrossCheck submission between accepted and rejected/unsuitable manuscripts?
Sun Huh
Department of Parasitology and Institute of Medical Education, Hallym University, Chuncheon 200-702, Korea
[email protected]
Purpose: This study investigated whether there is any significant difference between similarity values of accepted manuscript and those of rejected/unsuitable manuscripts. I would like to discuss if this kind of effort is a reasonable way to screen the manuscript before review process.
Methods: The unsolicited manuscripts to Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions were divided asaccepted manuscript and rejected/unsuitable manuscripts. Out of them two manuscripts that were first rejected and accepted after re-submission were removed. Comparison analysis with Student's t-test was done by statistical package, DBSTAT 5.0.
Results: Out of 28 unsolicited manuscripts, 10 were accepted (acceptance rate 35.7%). Mean similarity value of accepted manuscripts is 9.30 (range 0-38%, standard deviation 11.5, standard error 5.49). Mean of similarity value of rejected/unsuitable manuscripts is 24.17(range 3-65%, standard deviation 19.07, standard error 4.49). There was a significant difference of mean similarity value of two groups (p=0.0329, 95% confidence interval -1.3024 -28.4310). Since the lowest value of confidence interval is below 0, the statistical significance is not strong.
Conclusion: Although there was difference of similarity vale between accepted and rejected/unsuitable groups, it is difficult to say that similarity value is related with acceptance of manuscripts since the range is too wide; however, it is noticeable that similarity values of accepted manuscripts except one are all below 15%, it may be a simple criteria of acceptable manuscript, that is, if similarity value is over 15%, there is rare chance to be accepted. Since it is the results from a very small journal, more results should be obtained to generalize the above phenomena by co-work with colleague editors.
Keywords: CrossCheck, plagiarism, duplicate publication, comparison, acceptance, journal