LAUSR

Dear Editor, plagiarism is an important ethical problem in medicine. There are many cases of plagiarism in several publications. To deal with the problem, medical journals have to set a system for screening and managing detected plagiarism (Wiwanitkit 2013a, 2015a). The retraction of the problematic article is routine practice in case the plagiarizing work has already been published. In the case that it is not already published, rejection is the main practice. In any case, the notification from the journal is to the accused author and his/her institute. Some institutes might respond to the problem while the other might not (Wiwanitkit 2013b). An interesting issue is the response by the accused author. Here, authors may like to share my personal experience as an editor of medical journals. Within the past 10 years, my journals detected 52 cases of plagiarism and all cases were managed by a routine practice and notifications were done. There were various responses from accused authors. Of 52 cases, there were no replies in 14 cases. Focusing on the 38 cases with replies, 31 cases confessed to a plagiarism, 5 cases did not confess but asked for the withdrawal of their article despite that it had already been published. In one case the author denied plagiarism and asked a lawyer to sue the journal and in 1 case the author denied plagiarism and alleged that the problem was