Publishers are getting a new tool in the fight against plagiarism in scientific manuscripts.

The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters announced on May 1 that they would be offering their clients - the publishers of many well-read science journals - the option to employ iThenticate, a tool that checks submitted manuscripts for potential copy-catting against databases of previously published work.

According to Logan Hutchinson, a product manager in the Scientific business at Thomson Reuters, iThenticate "will reduce research integrity violations and plagiarism" by using technology to point editorial staff members in the direction of such infractions. "It's meant to provide a body of evidence," Hutchinson said.

The iThenticate tool will be offered as a part of the Manuscript Central service that many of Thomson Reuters' publisher-clients use for automated manuscript submission. iThenticate will digitally search, or "crawl," the text of submitted manuscripts, comparing it to existing manuscripts stored in publisher-stocked databases, such as CrossCheck, or to public libraries of papers, such as PubMed. Searching the public-facing internet as well as CrossCheck will help the program will flag more "fingerprinted" passages that show similarity to published papers that editors can check to see if plagiarism has occurred. "iThenticate is the technology and software that is powering all of the crawling and fingerprinting," Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson said that iThenticate will be fully integrated into Manuscript Central "sometime in 2009," with the CrossCheck database set to come online this June. He also said that iThenticate will help editors to catch plagiarism early on in the submission and peer review process, rather than after a plagiarized manuscript has been published.

Journals that employ Manuscript Central, and will have the option of using iThenticate, include the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Chemical Society and Oxford University Press families of publications, and journals published by Blackwell Publishing, such as Acta Zoologica, Clinical Genetics and Marine Ecology.

(Editor's Note: The original version of this story listed the journal Cell as one of publications using Manuscript Central. This is not the case, and mention of the journal has been removed from the story. The Scientist regrets the error.)