The recent editorial on plagiarism and copyright violation is interesting.1 Indeed, these two issues are not the same things but they usually exist concurrently. Typically, the plagiarist directly uses the verbatim content from the original source without proper citation and quotation. For sure, this is copy violation. However, the plagiarist might use other difficult-to-detect methods of plagiarism such as total or partial use of a figure (figure plagiarism), translation of the original text (translational plagiarism), or theft of an idea (conceptual plagiarism).2
Detection of these kinds of plagiarism is not possible with general computational plagiarism detection tools; readers and journal editors have to stay up-to-date to catch these new tricks of the plagiarists. Nevertheless, the proper management of cases of plagiarism and copy violation should be applied.
