Scientific misconduct: Plagiarism and non-compliance with disclosure of interest: Retrospective analysis of 1 year's submissions to Orthopaedics & Traumatology: Surgery & Research

Authors submitting to Orthopaedics & Traumatology: Surgery & Research (OTSR) must fulfill the criteria of scientific integrity (SI), including issues of plagiarism and disclosure of interest. These data have not been assessed for OTSR and we therefore conducted a retrospective study of (1) potential plagiarism rates, (2) deficient disclosure of interest (for French authors), and (3) correlation between the two. Suspected plagiarism rates exceed 20% and the non-disclosure rate exceeds 80%. We analyzed 1 year's submissions to OTSR: January 24, 2022 to January 23, 2023. Articles were checked for plagiarism, using iThenticate software (Turnitin, Oakland, CA, USA), with a threshold of > 20% matching. Conflicts of interest, for French authors, investigated on the French Ministry of Health Transparence website (www.transparence.sante.gouv.fr), with non-disclosure defined by undeclared amounts exceeding €1000. In total, 851 submissions were analyzed. iThenticate identified 152 (17.7%) with > 20% matching to an already published article. This likely plagiarism varied (p