Plagiarism Policy

All manuscripts under review or published with MJA are subject to screening using ithenticate. Plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics. Other violations include duplicate publication, data fabrication and falsification, and improper credit of author contribution.  Thus, plagiarism or fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior, and submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. It is necessary to mention that MJA may ignore a duplicated manuscript of up to 20%.

The development of CrossCheck is a service that helps editors to verify the originality of papers. CrossCheck is powered by the Ithenticate software from iParadigms, known in the academic community as providers of Turnitin.  For a searchable list of all journals in the CrossCheck database, please visit: www.ithenticate.com

All new submissions to many MJA are automatically screened using CrossCheck within the editorial system. Editorial Board Member may also choose to run a similarity report at any other point during the review process or post-publication. The default similarity report view gives the percentage of the text of the manuscript which has overlap with one or more published articles. Figures and equations cannot be checked at present. Note that a high similarity score does not necessarily indicate plagiarized text. A similarity score of 30% could mean 30% text in common with one source but could equally mean 1% text in common with 30 different sources. Re-used text that has been legitimately cited in the Bibliography may all contribute to the similarity score. The subject knowledge of an editorial expert is vital in order to interpret the CrossCheck report and determine whether there are any grounds for concern.