Copernicus Publications is a member of Similarity Check, a service provided by Crossref. Similarity Check enables the use of iThenticate. iThenticate is a plagiarism screening service that verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. The iThenticate software checks submissions against millions of published research papers, documents on the web, and other relevant sources. Authors can also use the iThenticate system to screen their work before submission by visiting http://www.ithenticate.com/.
Each manuscript newly submitted to the Copernicus Office Editor (manuscript review system) will be checked. In this process, iThenticate provides us with a similarity report listing (a) the percentage of similarity resulting from counted words and (b) the markup of the various sections, expressions, or terms which were found in other documents.
We check the similarity report and, if applicable, the report will be uploaded into the Copernicus Office Editor to be shown to the handling editor of the respective manuscript. The decision of whether or not a manuscript should be rejected because of fraud or proceed to the peer-review process rests with the handling editor. The similarity report is also made available to referees.