Policy of Screening for Plagiarism

Policy of Screening for Plagiarism

Papers submitted to the Journal of Mediterranean Cities will be screened for plagiarism using plagiarism detection tools. The journal will immediately reject papers leading to plagiarism or self-plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the use of published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) of others, without attribution or permission, and presenting them as new and original, rather than derived from an existing source. The intent and effect of plagiarism is to mislead the reader as to the contributions of the plagiarizer. This applies whether the ideas or words are taken from abstracts, research grant applications, Institutional Review Board applications, or unpublished or published manuscripts in any publication format. Plagiarism is scientific misconduct and should be addressed as such.

Journal of Mediterranean Cities requires authors to specify any sources of funding (institutional, private, and corporate financial support) for the work reported in their paper. This information, in the form of the name of the funding organization/s and the grant number -or should be included at the end of the article under the heading ‘Funding’ and provided at the time of submitting the paper. If there was no funding, the following wording should be used: “This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.” Any suppliers of materials should be named, and their location (town, state/county, country) included if appropriate. This information will be included in the published article.

Self-plagiarism refers to the practice of an author using portions of their previous writings on the same topic in another of their publications, without specifically citing it formally in quotes. This practice is widespread and sometimes unintentional, as there are only so many ways to say the same thing on many occasions, particularly when writing the methods section of an article. Although this usually violates the copyright that has been assigned to the publisher, there is no consensus as to whether this is a form of scientific misconduct, or how many of one's own words one can sue before it is truly "plagiarism." For this reason, self-plagiarism is not regarded in the same light as plagiarism of ideas and words of other individuals.

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 nonresponse 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 5 years.
  • The concerned head of the institution must be notified.

The Journal of Mediterranean Cities does not publish plagiarized papers. The Editorial Board has adopted the stance that plagiarism, where someone assumes another's ideas, words, or other creative expression as one's own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

 

Plagiarism Includes

Verbatim (word for word), or almost verbatim copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author's work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks) in a way described under Authors’ responsibilities;

Copying equations, figures, or tables from someone else's paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

The author bears the responsibility for checking whether the material submitted is subject to copyright or ownership rights, e.g., figures, tables, photographs, illustrations, trade literature and data. The author will need to obtain permission to reproduce any such items and include these permissions with their final submission. Where use is so restricted, the editorial office and Publisher must be informed with the final submission of the material. The author should add any necessary acknowledgements to the typescript, preferably in the form of an acknowledgements section at the end of the paper. The author should credit the source and copyright of photographs, figures, illustrations etc. in the supplementary captions. Plagiarism could be detected using Google search engine or one of two programs: iThenticate or Turnitin.