Due to what seems like an increasing incidence of rather blatant plagiarism that I've found in conference and journal submissions over the last year or two, I'm going to start running everything I review through a commercial plagiarism detector that the University of Minnesota makes available to all faculty. It is called Safe Assign, and it's very similar to Turn It In, which is probably the best known of those tools.
http://www.safeassign.com This will be a first pass that will at least catch near verbatim plagiarism such as I've reported on here already, and will hopefully save some time in tracking down such cases. I've reached a point where I think journals and conferences should probably screen like this even before they assign reviewers to submissions, just because it will save a lot of time, and will also make it much difficult for such work to slip through the cracks and end up being discovered after publication (which is what has happened in a few cases I've been involved with lately, which is fairly embarrassing for the affected journal). There are clear limits to what things like Safe Assign can check, but, it does catch at least the most obvious cases, and that's a start. Many universities do have site licenses for tools like Safe Assign and Turn It In, so if you find yourself doing very much reviewing at all, I'd encourage to to see if you have access so that you can do this sort of quick initial screening as well. Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
