PLAGIARISM AND DUALITY OF PUBLICATION

Plagiarism with respect to research had been defined by the US Office of Research Integrity, as the usage of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving proper credit. With this definition, plagiarism is believed to occur when there is misappropriation or theft of intellectual property and none attribution copying of someone else work. Practicing plagiarism comes with infraction of norms and ethical standards although may not be adjudged illegal. Plagiarism had been known to be thwarted by appropriately attributing vital parts or section to the author.

Any manuscript submitted to us is expected to be original and the manuscript, or vital parts of it, must not be currently undergoing consideration by any other journal. Peradventure a case of potential overlapping or repetition is to occur, we expect the authors to be transparent and not hide anything with respect to this with us. Declaration of an in formidable overlapping of publication by the Author on the submission, is mandatory not a choice. Citation of Any overlapping publications in press or unpublished manuscript important to our editorial team assessment of the manuscript is also mandatory. We reserved the full right to adjudge potentially overlapping or repetitive publications on a case by case standard.

Different Types of Plagiarism

Plagiarism outside of the authors’ own work:

  • Complete (also known as cloning or wholesale): Submitting a manuscript under ones name meanwhile you are not original owner.
  • Paraphrasing: This occur when you take the words of another author and use them with the original text devoid of attribution.
  • Patchwork (also known as remix, mosaic, mash-up or scattergun): This is whereby large source(s) are copied and an author mixed up with their own word.
  • Verbatim (also known as copy & paste, deliberate or word for word): Copying another person work or words partially without giving appropriate attribution and recognition.
  • Secondary source: This occur when you used a secondary source but made reference to the primary source containing within the secondary data
  • Unethical collaboration: This occurs when the authors deliberately or accidentally use each other’s written work without appropriate attribution; when people who are working together disregard code of conduct with scientific publications.
  • Buying manuscripts (all known as: purchase plagiarism): Purchasing manuscript from an organization or individual who intend to sale a full manuscripts for purchase.
  • Invalid source (also known as citation misattribution: Intentionally referencing an incorrect or a source that does not exist in order to hide overlap.
  • Image plagiarism: This occurs when author uses another person’s image without appropriate attribution/permission.
  • Redundant research: This occurs when data or/and text are repeated from a similar study with a similar methodology in a new study without appropriate attribution in order to make it look like a novel and original study.

Plagiarism with authors’ own work

Duplicate/Replication submission: This occurs when an author submit a manuscript to lots of publications in an effort to get it published more than once.

Text recycling/self plagiarism: Utilizing ones work from previous publication without proper attribution in current manuscript.

Cryptomnesia: This occurs when an author accidentally repeat data from own previous publications.

When is Plagiarism committed

Plagiarism is adjudged to take place when huge portion of text had been cut and pasted without proper and explicit attribution.

Recycling of text or reuse of a section of text from your own previous research publication is tagged self-plagiarism when it is devoid of proper attribution and citation.

Duplicate (or repetitive) publication takes place when an author utilize reuses large parts of his/her own published work either as an individual or group authors without indicating the appropriate references. This could occur when publishing an identical article in series of journals, to only add nothing or small amount of new data to already published paper.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Apart from extensive word for word reuse of text, extra care need to be taken to ensure proper attribution and citation when restating and summarizing other peoples work.

When discussing other authors published work, it is mandatory that authors appropriately describe the input of the previous work.  Intellectual inputs and technical knowhow must be acknowledged and properly cited.

How do we spot Plagiarism

  1. Our editorial office may spot plagiarism during pre-review checks on manuscripts submitted by running a Similarity Check for text overlapping in conjunction with Turnitin iThenticate and Crossref database through http://www.similaritycheck.com.ng.
  2. Journal Editor may identify or spot problems by the time they manually look into the report generated by the similarity check. 
  3. Plagiarism might be noticed by Reviewers or advisers with their knowledge of publications in the area when examining the manuscript. They could even recognized their own plagiarized work
  4. Our readers or whistle blowers could identify problems with a published article.

Our decision when plagiarism is identified

  • When a manuscript submitted is seen to have some elements of plagiarism, we will send it back to the corresponding author with the evidence attached so that the author can see how transparent we are and for the author to effect the necessary corrections and send the corrected version back to us
  • At post publication, if plagiarism becomes obvious, we could correct, withdraw or amend the original publication, although this depend on the intensity of plagiarism.