Subject: IJCNN2017 CrossCheck Results for paper #450
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2017 16:51:56 -0500
From: <. IJCNN Publications Chair name&email address .>
To: <. all authors of a paper that has been rejected because of CrossCheck .>

<. all of a papers' authors names .> - Attached is the CrossCheck report for your paper, and below my signature block are my "quick comments" regarding your paper.

FIRST of all!!! While the principal intent of CrossCheck is to provide a tool for checking for instances of plagiarism, actually there was NO FIRM INDICATION of plagiarism for any of the papers that I looked at in detail. Self-citation from the authors' previous papers, and at times similarity to phrasing in papers by other authors, was the only clear issue. No IJCNN2017 authors are being accused of plagiarism at this point. It would take a great deal more work (and additional expert peer review to doubly check) to establish that plagiarism is a possible issue for a paper other than really blatant cases.

IJCNN applies the official IEEE policy on plagiarism and self-citations.

As a rough guide of how this was applied for IJCNN2019 :

• >=50% similarity - All such papers are rejected EXCEPT when special conditions apply :
  • similarities come from an arXiv posting by at least one of the same authors. This includes cases where the entire paper was pre-posted to arXiv.org before submission. At present, other arXiv-like sites are not accepted, although the IEEE may add other sites to the list in the future.
  • a paper draws extensively from a thesis by one of the authors
  • a paper is close to 50% similarity, and mostly involves a diverse set of source papers (mostly the authors' previous papers), and fine-grained (eg sentence to paragraph level) similarities rather than >1/2 page "chunks" of continguous text from the same source.
• 30% < similarity < 50% - Rejection is primarily based on :
  • "chunks" of contiguous text >= 1/2 a page in length, rather than [phrase, sentence, paragraph] level, with an emphasis on [theory development, data, results, discussion, conclusions], and less of a focus on [Introduction, Literature Review, References]
  • AND one of :
    • >20% maximum similarity with a source by different authors, although two or more at 8-12% can be a problem
    • >30% maximum similarity with a source by at least one of the same authors

Note that proper quotation of a chunk of similar text would help address the above criteria at least partially, but is rarely seen in papers.

Please contact me with any questions that you have,

<. IJCNN Publications Chair name .>
IJCNN Publications Chair

+-----+
My own quick comments on your paper regarding CrossCheck results.

I composed quick notes for each of the 19 IJCNN2017 papers (out of ~900 papers submitted, and ~650 accepted). Initially, my comments were sparse, so later comments were expanded in detail.

"...
N-0450.pdf 61%
IJCNN2017 authors: <. author names .>
<. paper title .>
OK as paper from PhD thesis?
50% similarity with
<. URL to a similar paper .>
<. other authors .>
seems to have new technique/results, but it would take much more time to analyse the two to make a decision.
08% similarity with
<. URL to a similar paper .>
<. other authors .>
This is cited by the authors.
..."