Plagiarism Detection Guidelines

Plagiarism Detection

Alterjor Journal receives submissions based in good faith belief that the works sent are original and unpublished manuscripts. However, similarity verification is carried out without prior communication to the authors and always occurs during the evaluation process by using Turnitin tool, available for this purpose from an institutional agreement with the Universidade de Sao Paulo.

The detection of plagiarism by the Turnitin tool at an acceptable level considers that the result returned must present an originality result greater than 70%, which provides for detection compatible with excerpts marked as citations.

For other cases, the work is discarded immediately, involving communication to the authors about the occurrence of plagiarism detection. The plagiarism detection procedure is carried out within the scope of blind evaluation (without author identification) and in the case of the text corresponding to publications by the author himself (self-plagiarism), the adopted criterion no longer meets the originality requirement, as it is an existing work whose detection by Turnitin returns a similarity result of 50%.

• Regarding conditions of SELF-PLAGIARISM: there are two types of situations involving self-plagiarism whose similarity detection exceeds 50%, such as the Recycling (Reuse) of Conference Articles, whose text does not present any differentiation in relation to the original presented in Events (conferences, congresses, meetings, symposiums, etc.) mainly because the Conference Proceedings: Complete Works have a valid registration in the ISSN or ISBN and therefore, the detected version does not constitute a "manuscript original" and in this way, the first publication in the Conference proceedings corresponds to the original one. The other type of self-plagiarism, defined as "Mitosis" which are results from writing with the same focus and the same perspective aimed to multiple papers that in fact, necessarily refers to the same thing. In this same section, we highlight the main international ethics guideline of COPE (Committee On Publication Ethics): "Multiple, redundant and simultaneous publication: authors should not publish manuscripts that describe essentially the same research in more than one journal".

Although the use of Artificial Intelligence tools, such as Copilot integrated to Word (Text Processor), the iThenticate tool used for this purpose will perform a detection scan to consider the presence of automatically inserted text that is incompatible with human writing.
Artificial Intelligence does causes plagiarism when automatically generated paraphrases are not properly cited or when several authors enter the paraphrase compendium, compromising the correct citation or distinguish each authors. The plagiarism detection tool understands that citations arising from paraphrases without the use of quotation marks or in indented text without crediting the original author are compatible with practices related to plagiarism. In order to avoid inconvenience caused by "accidental" or "involuntary" paraphrasing induced by text self-generated by Artificial Intelligence, be sure to use references with the original text, credit the author in case of intentional paraphrasing or use quotation marks (up to 3 lines) or indented text.
The Artificial Intelligence aspect is included in the detection of plagiarism when text detection indicates the mimicry of the writing style of researchers who are deceased or (falsely) credited as co-authors without authorisation or consent to involvement a mimicry technology.

Though the usage of electronic plagiarism software, the individual contact (by accessing the menu About --> Contact) is also primordial in order to mitigate plagiarism, specially when a person faces themselves in situation analogue to plagiarism when a paper published brings a text essencially identical in theme, metodology and analysis of results reflects an existent research. The only exception applies to research projects which can bring similar thematics and nearness methodology, which implies in a different approach such as different development, analysis and achieving results in a perceptible different pathaways and by this way, that case cannot be framed as a derivation nor plagiarism.

 

Ethics Policies

• Ethics Policy

Alterjor Journal is committed to ethics and the quality of its publications. Plagiarism, derivative work by third parties or any other unethical behavior is not accepted. As a main value, we adopt the practice of non-compliance identified as "Predatory Journals";(https://www.predatoryjournals.org/home), one of the guidelines of Ibict Diadorim.

To this end, Alterjor Journal has as its principle the ethical behavior of all parties involved in the publication: authors, reviewers and editors.

This statement is based on the recommendations of Elsevier and the Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors from Committee on Publication Ethics - COPE (http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines).

• Ethical principles

The decisions of the Editors and the Editorial Board will not be influenced by commercial considerations or any source of revenue.

Alterjor is committed to intellectual standards and ethical principles and is willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when necessary. Regarding ethical complaints about a submitted manuscript or published article, the editors will take the necessary measures to investigate the complaints, as well as their corrections or retractions.

• Editors Duties

Publication decision: editors responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal should be published are guided by the journal's policies, which must comply with current legal requirements regarding defamation, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Transparency and respect: editors must evaluate submitted manuscripts without taking into account the race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, nationality or political philosophy of the authors.

Confidentiality: editors must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript, except to reviewers and editorial advisors.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest: editors must refuse to evaluate manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest, for collaborative, competitive reasons or other connections with any of the authors or institutions linked to the manuscripts, for which they must rely on the Editorial Board.

Involvement and cooperation in investigations: Editors must take appropriate action when ethical complaints are made regarding a submitted manuscript or published article.

Editorial responsibility: editors must always preserve the identity of authors and reviewers anonymously and treat manuscripts as confidential documents.

• Reviewers Duties

Confidentiality: works received for analysis must be treated as confidential documents and must not disclose any information about the manuscript or show or discuss it with other people.

Disclosure and conflict of interest: referees must maintain confidentiality and must not use, for personal benefit, information or ideas obtained through reading the manuscripts.

Regarding sources: referees must identify relevant published works that were not cited by the authors, as well as draw the editors' attention to any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript in question and any other published article of which they have personal knowledge.

• Authors Duties

Originality and plagiarism: authors must ensure that works are entirely original and if they use the work and/or texts of others this is properly cited. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical editorial behavior and is unacceptable.

Authorship: authorship of the work must be restricted to those who made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions must be listed as co-authors. People who participated in certain aspects of the research project should be listed as collaborators. The lead author must ensure that all appropriate co-authors are included in the article. The main author must ensure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and that they have agreed to its submission for publication.

• Multiple, redundant and simultaneous publication: Authors should not publish manuscripts that describe essentially the same research in more than one journal.

 

ABOUT SELF-PLAGIARISM

This category is related to lack of attention and falls on the author's choice not to write unpublished manuscripts, aiming to reuse works already published in other sources, notably with workbooks complete with ISSN or ISBN, since the sections on Plagiarism and Authors' Obligations are available and, not for lack of warning, the responsibility of Authors particularly concerns the sending of original manuscripts, which are the EXCLUSIVE responsibility of AUTHORS and the finding of compatibility with plagiarism constitutes a serious failure in relation to ethical publication standards.

In both cases of finding similarity with unquoted or reused texts, the justification "I DO NOT KNOW, I DID NOT MEAN" is not applicable, since the obligation of methodological review (not just grammatical or textual reviews) is the responsibility of the authors and any inattention, lack of checking or use of technologies that, instead of offering access to full citations, bring variations paraphrased or attributed to "authors" non-existent (from social networks to fabricated authors' names), it depends on the authors' decision, even if this choice was made incorrectly, such scope and the lack of verification as insufficient to prevent the occurrence of plagiarism. The main cases of self-plagiarism involve:

• RECYCLING - re-publish of complete works at conferences (meetings, seminars, symposiums, congresses, etc.) in their entirety (word for word/verbatim) or with a similarity rate greater than 50%, such as, for example, republication of theoretical, analytical frameworks, tables or sub-items in full or, with the occurrence of paraphrasing (replacement of nouns and adjectives with different corresponding ones) in order to provoke a perception differentiated when, in fact, it is the same sentence already published in something that cannot be configured within the characteristics of an Original Manuscript;
• MITOSIS: also goes back to the use of a work already published in another journal or in a conference, whose noticeable results still involve similarity at a rate of 55% with works by the same author with total or partial occurrence of paraphrasing;
• HALF-N-HALF: consists of reusing excerpts from works already published in periodicals or notebooks with ISBN or ISSN, in a structure similar to Patchwork. Among the forms of self-plagiarism mentioned, Half-N-Half is the only way to verify the feasibility of publication in specific situations of maintaining the condition of an unpublished manuscript: in the case of thesis, dissertation and research reports with limited or reduced circulation, when excerpts have not been previously published in any scientific publication medium with ISBN or ISSN, as long as the integrity of the thesis, dissertation, research report with only used excerpts is observed, or if the extracted portions do not correspond to others already published by the same author in previous moments. The occurrence of duplicate publications in different journals, as well as the Recycling of works in magazines or books, Selective Derivation or written work "Half-N-Half" consists of the author's failure to comply with the Plagiarism Prevention measures, because even intentionally (with a clear intention to publish repeated works instead of creating new works in books, magazines and conferences), they assumed the risk of committing themselves to complications arising from Self-Plagiarism. In both cases, once plagiarism is found with a similarity greater than 55% of the entire text, Journal Alterjor will automatically discard works proven to be "not unpublished", since the submission of works and the evaluation process is based on the good faith that the authors who submit their manuscripts are aware of the originality of their work and that, even after approval by the Editorial Council, the finding of similarity greater than a corresponding portion between the entirety or more of half of the work sent, constitutes a serious error on the part of the author, whose responsibility lies with him, from the decision not to write unpublished contributions to even when he chose to send the same content to a magazine, book or conferences. The appropriate ethical procedure recommended to authors consists of communicating to all outlets that the same work was sent following the acceptance of publication (or participation in an event) of the first outlet in chronological order to the rest of the other journals whose same work is in the evaluation phase: the author must choose to publish a SINGLE version of the work in a outlet WITH THE OBLIGATION TO CONTACT OTHERS who already had the same contribution in the evaluation process, in order to ASK FOR THE DISPOSAL OF IDENTICAL WORK IN OTHER VEHICLES, as a WAY OF AVOIDING FUTURE RE-ISSUING and thus compromising the required and necessary condition of original manuscript for authors.
• IMPORTANT: archiving a pre-print version on social networks such as ResearchGate and Academia.Edu does not constitute a valid first publication due to the fact that these platforms do not have an ISBN or ISSN nor do they have a Scientific Council designated to evaluate the quality of published materials. Although "unpublished works (pre-print)" may have DOI offered through these means, authors are recommended that, once published, the pre-print versions, notably NOT EVALUATED BY ANY DESIGNATION OF SCIENTIFIC TEAM, REPLACE such previous versions with the final published ones, as in addition to having been evaluated with scientific criteria, the authors himselves have the authorised rights to share his own work assured by the Creative Commons licencing.

References:

Authors must cite publications that were important in determining the nature of the manuscript, as the work of other authors must always be recognised. Information obtained in a conversation, correspondence or discussion with third parties should only be used with the explicit permission of the source.

Errors in published work: when authors discover a significant error or inaccuracy in their published work it is an obligation to inform and co-operate with editors in order to correct the essay. Please do note: Alterjor will only fix the faulty papers of the current issue (during a six-month term), regarding the preservation of the contents, the evaluation and acceptance of that version and regarding the quotes that can be made in new papers from different authors. As a way to fix a faulty paper, we suggest that the authors can write a new essay quoting that one and update all the affected components in a new paper.