Lin Chang

BackgroundPlagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature. However, its detection is time consuming and difficult, presenting challenges to editors and publishers who are entrusted with ensuring the integrity of published literature.MethodsIn this study, the extent of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to a major specialty medical journal was documented. We manually curated submitted manuscripts and deemed an article contained plagiarism if one sentence had 80 % of the words copied from another published paper. Commercial plagiarism detection software was utilized and its use was optimized.ResultsIn 400 consecutively submitted manuscripts, 17 % of submissions contained unacceptable levels of plagiarized material with 82 % of plagiarized manuscripts submitted from countries where English was not an official language. Using the most commonly employed commercial plagiarism detection software, sensitivity and specificity were studied with regard to the generated plagiarism score. The cutoff score maximizing both sensitivity and specificity was 15 % (sensitivity 84.8 % and specificity 80.5 %).ConclusionsPlagiarism was a common occurrence among manuscripts submitted for publication to a major American specialty medical journal and most manuscripts with plagiarized material were submitted from countries in which English was not an official language. The use of commercial plagiarism detection software can be optimized by selecting a cutoff score that reflects desired sensitivity and specificity.

We consider on a two-dimensional flat torus $T$ defined by a rectangular periodic cell the following equation $$ \Delta u + \rho \left = 0, \quad \int _{T} u = 0. $$ It is well-known that the associated energy functional admits a minimizer for each $\rho \le 8 \pi $. The present paper shows that these minimizers depend actually only on one variable. As a consequence, setting $\lambda _1 $ to be the first eigenvalue of the Laplacian on the torus, the minimizers are identically zero whenever $\rho \le \min \lbrace 8 \pi, \lambda _1 |T| \rbrace $. Our results hold more generally for solutions that are Steiner symmetric, up to a translation

We consider a sequence of multi-bubble solutions $ u_k$ of the following fourth order equation $$\qquad \qquad \! \Delta ^2 u_k = \rho _k \frac{ h e^{u_k}}{ \int _\Omega h e^{u_k}} \ \ \mbox {in} \ \Omega, \ \ u_k=\Delta u_k=0 \ \ \mbox {on} \ \partial \Omega,\qquad \qquad \qquad $$ where $h$ is a $C^{2, \beta }$ positive function, $\Omega $ is a bounded and smooth domain in $\mathbb{R}^4$, and $\rho _k$ is a constant such that $ \rho _k\! \le \! C$. We show that, $\lim _{ k\rightarrow +\infty } \rho _k \!=\! 32 \sigma _3 m $ for some positive integer $m\! \ge \! 1$, where $\sigma _3$ is the area of the unit sphere in $\mathbb{R}^4$. Furthermore, we obtain the following sharp estimates for $\rho _k$: $$ \begin{aligned} \rho _k\! -\! 32 \sigma _3 m\! &=\! c_0 \sum _{j=1}^m\! \epsilon _{k, j}^2\! \left\! +\! \Delta R_4 \!+\! \frac{1}{32 \sigma _3} \Delta \log h \!\right)\hspace{-2.0pt}\\ &\quad + o\left \end{aligned} $$ where $c_0\!>\!0$, $\log \frac{64}{\epsilon _{k, j}^4 }\!=\!\!\! \max \limits _{x \in B_\delta }\! u_k \!-\!\log $ and $u_k \!\rightarrow \! 32 \sigma _3 \sum \limits _{j=1}^m G_4 $ in $ C^4_{\rm loc} $. This yields a bound of solutions as $\rho _k$ converges to $ 32 \sigma _3 m$ from below provided that $$ \sum _{j=1}^m \left + \Delta R_4 + \frac{1}{32 \sigma _3} \Delta \log h \right)>0.$$ The analytic work of this paper is the first step toward computing the Leray-Schauder degree of solutions of equation $$

This study empirically examined the effects of ethical leadership and ethical climate on employee ethical behavior in the international port context using survey data collected from 128 respondents who worked in Taiwan International Ports Corporation in Taiwan. Research hypotheses were formulated from the previous literature and tested using structural equation modeling. Results indicated that ethical leadership had a significant impact on ethical climate and the ethical behavior of TIPC employees. Ethical climate was found to be positively associated with employee ethical behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of the research findings are discussed.