Plagiarism Policy

         "PLAGIARISM" can occur in two forms:

 

• Author(s) intentionally copy someone else’s work and claim it as their own.

 

• Author(s) copy her or his own previously published material either in full or in part, without providing appropriate references Plagiarism before publication:

 

         The Journal performs plagiarism checks on a manuscript even before the peer-review process. If plagiarism is detected the extent of the same will be assessed. The Journal uses available standard software from time to time to check this. Based on this assessment the following measures are taken:

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• If the percentage of plagiarism is 20% or less, the author will be asked to revise the content or cite accordingly.

 

• If it is above 20% - 25%the author will be asked to revise the content with much more serious and resubmit the content.

 

• If it is more than 25% the manuscript will be returned to the author and to redraft the whole paper taking much care about plagiarism. The author can still resubmit with the same manuscript ID after removing all plagiarized parts and reworking the content. In this case, more scrutiny will be done on the resubmitted manuscript to avoid any possible plagiarism and copying of any published data or manipulation of data.

 

          Here 5% plagiarism is considered as a paragraph of 5-10 lines (1.5 spacing). Accordingly, 10% and 25% would be calculated. This is a rough estimate which cannot be followed exactly but would be followed as guidelines.

The reason for returning the manuscript having more than 25% plagiarism is that

 

• Possibility of unethical behavior of author towards manipulation of data from the already published paper.

• To avoid any issues of copyright problems once the paper is published.

• Copying of discussion /introduction part from any published paper without giving a proper citation.

 

         Plagiarism may happen if the author submits the same manuscript to more than one journal and if those get published in the respective journals this reflects the unethical practice of the journal. In this case, the author would be asked for an explanation and rectification and should withdraw the published manuscript except one. If an author fails to do so, the journal takes punitive action against this unethical practice by withdrawing the manuscript, displaying this issue on the appropriate journal page and a notification would be sent to the respective author's affiliated department/university for their attention.

 

         Though all measures are taken to detect and assess plagiarism. But in spite of these efforts plagiarism can go undetected due to several reasons. In these cases, if plagiarism is detected at a later stage, still all actions pertaining to the offence of plagiarism will be followed. If it is detected after publication, the plagiarized paper will be labelled so in the PDF format of the publication. If the extent of plagiarism is too high the paper will also be removed.