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Q: What is the acceptable percentage of plagiarism report?
There is a lack of consensus or clear-cut-rules on what percentage of plagiarism is acceptable in a manuscript. Going by the convention, usually a text similarity below 15% is acceptable by the journals and a similarity of >25% is considered as high percentage of plagiarism.
But even in case of 15% similarity, if the matching text is one continuous block of borrowed material, it will be considered as plagiarized text of significant concern. On the other hand, text similarity due to the usage of common terminologies and method related details in ‘Methodology’ part of a manuscript should not raise a serious ethical concern.
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Different universities, schools, and colleges have different requirements for the percentage of plagiarism in assignments. Some of them allow students to have not more than 15% of similarity. Some prohibit any plagiarism. As for me, teachers can detect real plagiarism only if they check the similarity report AND review the results found. Some results may include terminology, numbers, common names, etc. Thus, it can’t be considered as plagiarism, although the plagiarism checking tool shows it in the report.
This content belongs to the Manuscript Writing Stage