Fabienne Michaud

In 2022, we flagged up some changes to Similarity Check, which were taking place in v2 of Turnitin’s iThenticate tool used by members participating in the service. We noted that further enhancements were planned, and want to highlight some changes that are coming very soon. These changes will affect functionality that is used by account administrators, and doesn’t affect the Similarity Reports themselves. From Wednesday 3 May 2023, administrators of iThenticate v2 accounts will notice some changes to the interface and improvements to the Users, Groups, Integrations, Statistics and Paper Lookup sections.

Since we announced last September the launch of a new version of iThenticate, a number of you have upgraded and become familiar with iThenticate v2 and its new and improved features which include: A faster, more user-friendly and responsive interface A preprint exclusion filter, giving users the ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily A new “red flag” feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement A private repository available for browser users, allowing them to compare against their previous submissions to identify duplicate submissions within your organisation A content portal, helping users check how much of their own published content has been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.

Background Perhaps, like us, you’ve noticed that it is not always easy to find information on who is on a journal’s editorial board and, when you do, it is often unclear when it was last updated. The editorial board details might be displayed in multiple places (such as the publisher’s website and the platform where the content is hosted) which may or may not be in sync and retrieving this information for any kind of analysis always requires manually checking and exporting the data from a website (as illustrated by the Open Editors research and its dataset).

Some context The Similarity Check Advisory Group met a number of times last year to discuss current and emerging originality issues with text-based content. During those meetings, the topic of image integrity was highlighted as an area of growing concern in scholarly communications, particularly in the life sciences. Over the last few months, we have also read with interest the recommendations for handling image integrity issues by the STM Working Group on Image Alteration and Duplication Detection, followed closely image integrity sleuths such as Elizabeth Bik and have, like many of you, noticed that image manipulation is increasingly given as the reason for retractions.

Crossref Similarity Check news: iThenticate v2.0 ready for launch Last year, we announced the upcoming launch of a new version of iThenticate, the product from Turnitin that powers Crossref Similarity Check. We know some of you have been waiting a long time for this upgrade and we are very happy to share with you that we are now ready to release it. We will be rolling out this new version in stages, so not everyone will be able to upgrade to the new version immediately.