Plagiarism
Plagiarism Policy of AIJR
Scientific integrity as well as the peer-review process is the heart of scholarly publishing. As a part of our commitment to protect the integrity of scholarly publications, we take the necessary steps in all aspects of publishing ethics. Plagiarism takes many forms, from intentionally passing off someone else’s work as your own to unintentional paraphrasing someone else’s work without proper attribution. Does not matter in which form or to what extent, plagiarism always constitutes unethical behavior and is unacceptable in academic publishing.
Plagiarized articles are not allowed in any publication by AIJR. Even though plagiarism is a serious issue but it’s very easy to avoid by giving proper acknowledgment to the work of others. Before submitting the manuscript to any AIJR publications, the authors should ensure that they have written original works. In the case where authors have used someone else’s or own previously published work/words, that should be properly attributed through appropriate citation. The author shall remember to not use information obtained privately without explicit, written permission from the source; for instance, the knowledge gained through peer-reviewing of other’s work or through third party discussion.
AIJR publisher is using iThenticate plagiarism software provided by CrossRef Similarity Check for the initial plagiarism detection but still if later on any article is found to be plagiarized then appropriate action will be taken as per our ethical policy and that article might get retracted. Overall similarity index of the manuscript should not be more than 15% for research articles and 20% for review articles with a limitation of less than 3% similarity from any individual source.
Similarity Check is a multi-publisher initiative to screen published and submitted content for originality. AIJR publisher uses the iThenticate software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts which compare content against its database of periodicals, the Internet, as well as other wide-range databases of articles. AIJR publisher is committed to actively combating plagiarism and publishing original research.
Plagiarism Detection Criteria
The managing editor performs plagiarism detection during the review process or before the acceptance of the manuscript. The time of plagiarism detection varies depending on the editor’s judgment, sometimes we check before initiating peer-review and sometimes before final publication, and even sometimes before reviewing and publication both. It does not matter when the manuscript undergoes plagiarism detection but it will go at least once from submission to the publication time period. The iThenticate software generates a similarity report, highlighting the percentage overlap between the author’s submitted manuscript and already published material. We analyze the generated plagiarism report in the following two steps-
Overall Similarity
To determine overall content similarity, we manually check the plagiarism report for sources from where content has been reported to be plagiarized. If it includes any preprint server sharing the same author as in the submitted manuscript, that particular source gets excluded. Allowed similarity content for Review Article is up to 20%, and for all other types of articles, it’s up to 15% provided that similarity content shall be less than 3% for any individual source.
Similarity with Individual Source
Sometimes manuscripts report shows overall low similarity percentage, but a higher percentage from a single source which is also considered as plagiarized. For such cases, the allowed similarity percentage explained above gets further scrutinized manually for the including source. Any individual source shall not constitute similar content of more than 3%.
Summary of Allowed Similarity
- For Review Article, up to 20%.
- For all other types of articles including Research Article, up to 15%.
- In both the above cases, similarity from an individual source can be up to 3%.
Note: Posting an article on a standard preprint server is not considered plagiarized provided that the author of the preprint article and submitted manuscript are the same. Read detail on acceptable subsequent publications by AIJR.
Types of Plagiarism
Not all types of plagiarism are alike and the determination of its seriousness depends on whether the act of plagiarism was intentional or unintentional. There are many types of plagiarism, here are the few common types of plagiarism-
- Complete Plagiarism (Intellectual Theft): When the author steals a manuscript of someone else and submits it under the author’s own name.
- Direct Plagiarism (Dishonest): When the author copies word for word from the part of someone else’s work.
- Self-Plagiarism (Duplication of own work): When the author uses their own previous publication in another paper without proper citation and acknowledgment of the original source.
- Source-based Plagiarism (Misleading citation): When a researcher cites incorrect references or secondary references.
- Data Plagiarism (Fabrication & falsification): When the author uses other data patterns for making up of own data and research findings or changes a few data to give a false finding.
- Poor paraphrasing: Copying complete paragraphs and modifying a few words without changing the structure of original sentences or changing the sentence structure but not the words.
- Paraphrasing Plagiarism (Most common and serious): Reproduction of others words, sentences, ideas, or findings as one’s own without proper attribution.
- Accidental Plagiarism (Unintentional paraphrasing): When plagiarism occurs accidentally because of neglecting, mistakenly, or unintentional paraphrasing due to unawareness of plagiarism.
While complete plagiarism is considered the most serious on the other hand accidental plagiarism is less serious, paraphrasing is one of the most common and serious concerns for scholarly publishers. Any type of plagiarism is not acceptable regardless of its seriousness.
What if Author Submit Plagiarized Article?
The action in such cases varies from the extent of plagiarized content as well as the intention of the author. In any case, such activity will not be overlooked and will get considered as author misconduct, the action may include blocking for future submission; ethical misconduct action, public post, informing institution, etc.
Plagiarism Detected After Publication
In some cases, plagiarism detection fails during the peer-review process; for instance, if the source article was published recently and not yet crawled by the iThenticate database until we ran the software for detection. Published articles that are later found to contain plagiarized text will be investigated as per our ethical policy. Such articles may get retracted after careful investigation and approval of the editorial board members. Refer to withdrawal policy for more detail on the article retraction policy.
