Plagiarism Policy

Plagiarism is utilizing the published or unpublished ideas, words, or other intellectual property of others without appropriate acknowledgment or consent, and falsely presenting them as novel and creative rather than sourced from existing material. The purpose and consequence of plagiarism is to deceive the reader on the contributions of the plagiarist. This is applicable regardless of whether the concepts or language are derived from abstracts, research funding proposals, Institutional Review Board submissions, or unpublished or published articles in whatever format of publishing. Plagiarism is scientific misconduct and must be treated accordingly.

Self-plagiarism denotes the act of an author reutilizing segments of their prior works on the same subject in a subsequent publication, without properly crediting it in quotation marks. This approach is prevalent and occasionally inadvertent, as there are limited expressions to convey same concepts in many contexts, especially when composing the methods portion of an essay. While this often infringes upon the copyright granted to the publisher, there is no agreement over whether this constitutes scientific misconduct or the extent of one's own words that can be utilized before it is classified as "plagiarism." For this reason, self-plagiarism is typically not viewed with the same severity as the plagiarism of others' ideas and words. If journals have established a policy regarding this issue, it should be explicitly communicated to authors.

Direct plagiarism refers to the verbatim replication of content. Mosaic plagiarism is the appropriation of concepts and viewpoints from an original source, accompanied by a limited number of exact words or phrases, without attributing the author.

Authors can adhere to the following steps to report plagiarism:

• Inform the editor of the journal where a plagiarized article is published.
• Send original and plagiarized articles with plagiarized part highlighted.
• If evidence of plagiarism is convincing, editor should arrange for a disciplinary meeting.
• Editor of the journal where the plagiarized article should communicate with the editor of the journal containing the original article to rectify the matter.
• The plagiarist should be asked to provide an explanation.
• In case of non-response in the stipulated time or an unsatisfactory explanation, the article should be permanently retracted.
• Author should be blacklisted and debarred for submitted an article to a particular journal for at least 6 months.
• The concerned head of the institution has to be notified.