Can you give us a sense of how active these ethical issues are with our journals right now? Are these burgeoning problems or is this a low trickle that has been attended to by most authors carefully and isn't met on a weekly basis? I wouldn't say it's a burgeoning problem, but I would say that because attention is being paid to it more now than it was many years ago, it is being brought to the forefront now. Dr. Wallace, the editor-in-chief of GIE, definitely looks at this closely and so do we, and we will make sure that these things are followed. I don't think there's any more than there was. In fact, there's probably less than there used to be because we are bringing it to the attention of everyone. Stephanie, do you agree? I do agree, and I also think that there are things changing with technology and developments in the field have brought to light a lot of unethical issues or showed us the problem that some of these unethical issues are. For example, with plagiarism, everybody's always known plagiarism is wrong, but we're realizing now that we have plagiarism checking software, we're catching more instances of this plagiarism that would have gone overlooked two decades ago. I think that these developments are helping us catch these unethical issues before we go to publication, but it's also creating new ethical concerns when we develop things like I was talking about, the development of open access publishing or preprint servers. Well, now we have to learn how to adapt the field to deal with these new and changing times. Okay. You referenced the risk of plagiarizing yourself, and it's not uncommon for an author to write very similar reviews, almost identical reviews, serially, and it's not uncommon for that to be with the same publisher, sometimes even requested by the publisher as an update. At what point is that no longer plagiarism? If it's the same ownership, the same publisher, the same author, the same topic, or is it eternally needing to be rewritten? I mean, it is eternally needing to be rewritten. Well, you don't want to publish the exact same content over and over again, but what plagiarism really comes down to is a duplicate text, so you can't republish the exact same text. So if you are writing a similar article, that's fine, but rewrite it. Figure out another way to say things. Make sure it's not directly overlapping with the previous article, because it's that wording, that text, that is under copyright with that previous publication. So it's the fine point of the actual sentence structure that's a challenge. If you're talking about the same disease state or the same maneuver, you can say it 20 ways, and as long as you do say it differently, that's okay, but if you just cut and paste the same sentence, that's a problem. Right. In that case, if it's like a quote, that's fine. Put it in quotation marks and cite that. If you are rewriting something that was already published, you can still cite that in the text, but just rewrite it so it's not directly copying, and I think that this is a concern for people who are experts on this very specific topic, and they do write similar articles over and over again, and so especially in this field, that's something that you need to be on the lookout for. So I presume those remarks also apply to some topics which are standing reviews that are eternally retained, but every three to eight years, a publisher or an organization like the ASGE updates the topic, perhaps with a different authorship or a different committee renewing the same committee's product from previous years, and if 50% of the topic is unchanged, that still needs a rewrite of the language. Is that fair to say? Or you could retain the prior authorship, and does that enable the ASGE to have an updated guideline that that employs some of the prior language? Debra, do you want to work more with guidelines? Yeah. No, you really should rewrite it because it's an entirely different article, even though you're updating the previous one, and you can include the same information. Certainly cite it and make sure that the readers are aware that this is from a previous article. If you do want to quote single sentences, do so, but put them in quotes and attribute them. But overall, you should reword. Restate it, sure. Restate, yes. Yeah. This is a very common issue with our committee structure, keeping us current with multiple documents. Good. Absolutely. All right. I don't know. I haven't seen other things come forward on the Q&A line. But I really appreciate your dual reviews of these both distinct but important topics that are highly topical today. We'll look once again for input from our Q&A line. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for allowing us to present. This has been an honor. Thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you. Good. Thank you.

ethical issues

academic publishing

plagiarism

plagiarism checking software

rewriting articles