Plagiarism policy

What counts as plagiarism

Presenting someone else's words, ideas, data, figures or analysis as your own. It does not require intent, and it does not require copying a whole paper. All of the following are plagiarism for the purposes of this policy:

• Reproducing text from another source without quotation marks and a citation.
• Paraphrasing another author's argument closely without crediting them.
• Reusing figures, tables or data without permission and attribution.
• Self-plagiarism. Reusing substantial parts of your own earlier published work without citing it. A reader is entitled to know what is new.
• Duplicate submission. Sending the same manuscript to IJCRM and to another journal at the same time.

Screening

Every manuscript is checked for similarity against published literature before it is sent for peer review. Screening happens before review rather than after, so that a reviewer's time is not spent on a paper that will not proceed.

The journal works to a similarity index of 10 per cent or below, excluding the reference list and correctly quoted and attributed material. A similarity report is a starting point for an editor's judgement, not a verdict: a paper can sit under the threshold and still contain a plagiarised paragraph, and a legitimate paper in a narrow field can sit above it because the standard phrasing of a method is genuinely shared.

Found before publication

• Minor overlap. The manuscript is returned to the corresponding author to cite properly and resubmit.
• Substantial plagiarism. The manuscript is rejected and the corresponding author is told why.

Found after publication

The article stays online. IJCRM does not delete published articles, because the address is cited in other people's work and a dead link hides the problem rather than correcting it. Instead:

• The corresponding author is contacted and asked to respond.
• Where the concern is upheld, a retraction notice is published and the article is marked as retracted, clearly, at its original address.
• The notice states what was wrong and who raised it, so the record explains itself to anyone who arrives at the paper through a citation.

Retracting in place rather than deleting is deliberate. A reader following a citation from a 2019 reference list must arrive at something that tells them the paper was withdrawn, not at a 404 that tells them nothing.

Authors' responsibility

The corresponding author is responsible for the originality of the whole manuscript, including parts written by co-authors. Check the paper before submitting it: the author guidelines cover what to prepare, and it is easier to add a citation now than to answer for its absence later.

Reporting a concern

If you believe an article published in IJCRM contains plagiarised material, write to editor@ijcrm.com with the article title, the issue, and the source you believe it was taken from. Concerns are examined regardless of who raises them, and the person raising a concern is not identified to the author without their agreement.

The wider publication ethics policy covers authorship disputes, data integrity, conflicts of interest and corrections.