RESUMO
INTRODUCTION: Authors submitting to Orthopaedics & Traumatology: Surgery & Research (OTSR) must fulfill the criteria of scientific integrity (SI), including issues of plagiarism and disclosure of interest. These data have not been assessed for OTSR and we therefore conducted a retrospective study of (1) potential plagiarism rates, (2) deficient disclosure of interest (for French authors), and (3) correlation between the two. HYPOTHESIS: Suspected plagiarism rates exceed 20% and the non-disclosure rate exceeds 80%. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We analyzed 1 year's submissions to OTSR: January 24, 2022 to January 23, 2023. Articles were checked for plagiarism, using iThenticate software (Turnitin, Oakland, CA, USA), with a threshold of > 20% matching. Conflicts of interest, for French authors, investigated on the French Ministry of Health Transparence website (www.transparence.sante.gouv.fr), with non-disclosure defined by undeclared amounts exceeding 1000. RESULTS: In total, 851 submissions were analyzed. iThenticate identified 152 (17.7%) with > 20% matching to an already published article. This likely plagiarism varied (p<0.01) between geographic origins of submissions. In the 289 submissions by French authors, there were 275 (95%) failures to report amounts exceeding 1000. Combined non-disclosure and plagiarism was found in only 3 articles submitted by French authors (3/289: 1.03%). DISCUSSION: OTSR applies the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (www.icmje.org), adheres to the guidelines of the Committee On Publication Ethics (COPE) and the French Health Authority (HAS), and has an ethics committee. Plagiarism is a major SI breach, suspected in 20% of submissions. Also, 95% of French authors failed to properly disclose their interests on submitting an article, although this declaration is mandatory in France and is an integral aspect of SI. There are also other forms of misconduct, such as failure to comply with the French "Jardé" law on research involving human subjects, failure to obtain review board approval, unjustified claims to authorship or deficient archiving, that were not analyzed here. CONCLUSIONS: Although overall plagiarism rates were under 20% for submissions to OTSR, some geographic areas were more concerned than others. Also, despite reminders by the editorial board, only 5% of French authors made full disclosures; this is a major breach of SI, requiring correction on the part of French authors. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: IV; retrospective study.