What percentage of plagiarism or self-plagiarism is acceptable in an article or monograph?

Most scientists are familiar with the meaning of the terms "plagiarism" and "self-plagiarism", and if not, you can read about these concepts in our post "Publication ethics: the difference between plagiarism and self-plagiarism".
In the scientific world, 0-25% of non-uniqueness of the text is acceptable for publications. And do not be surprised that this figure starts from zero. Many scientists would be outraged if they had to achieve 100% uniqueness of the text of their manuscript, as there are many standard statements that will spoil the uniqueness of any work. But, indeed, there are such journals. These are mainly journals with the highest Scopus or WoS scores, which are fighting for the championship, so they publish only the most unique articles on their pages.
As you have already understood, each scientific publication defines its own boundaries of plagiarism and self-plagiarism. For example, for the journals of our publishing house, which are indexed in Scopus ("Eastern-European Journal of Enterprise Technologies", "ScienceRise: Pharmaceutical Science"), this figure is 10-15%. For our professional journals of category B ("Technology audit and production reserves", "ScienceRise: Medical Science", "ScienceRise: Pedagogical Education", "ScienceRise: Biological Science", "ScienceRise: Juridical Science"), it is 15-20 %. For monographs, since they are usually a generalization of the authors' research and, accordingly, some parts of the research at the time of preparation of the monograph have already been covered, the rate of plagiarism and self-plagiarism is limited to 20-25%.
But keep in mind that the reports on uniqueness are reviewed by experts, so if, for example, the permissible 10-25% are in the results of the study (in fact, the main part of the publication) or all from one source, then such a work will also not be considered unique. Since this calls into question the scientific novelty of such work.
We hope this information was useful to you.


