African medical journals have a plagiarism problem. A study that looked at nearly 500 papers in 100 Africa-based journals found that 63 percent contained some form of plagiarism. The study, published in BMJ Open by researchers based in South Africa, Croatia and the UK, sampled the papers from African Journals Online (AJOL), a database that aims to boost the visibility of journals from the continent. They randomly selected five papers published in 2016 from each of the 100 journals - fewer for journals that did not publish five articles that year. They ran the final sample of 495 papers through plagiarism-checking software. The study also found that only 26 of the 100 journals had a policy on plagiarism posted on their website, and a mere 16 stated that they used plagiarism software. The authors say that this points to a ‘major problem with writing and publishing in medical science in Africa.’ The numbers are higher than those found in comparable studies for other regions.
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