Policy of the Indian Journal of Psychiatry on the problem of plagiarism.

Abstract

Byline: T. Sathyanarayana Rao, Chittaranjan. Andrade Editors of journals frequently face academic and administrative problems, and sometimes ethical problems, as well; plagiarism, though uncommon, is one of these. Plagiarism is most simply defined as the misrepresentation of another's ideas or words as one's own, without acknowledgement of the original source. [sup][1] The concept is broad, and includes plagiarism of concepts as well as plagiarism of text. Plagiarism of original material may be total, or the guilty author may interlace his own words and ideas with those from the source, constituting what is known as mosaic plagiarism. Authors may also reproduce their own, previously published material; this is called self-plagiarism, and duplicate publication is an extreme example of such an act. [sup][2] The temptation to plagiarize may at least in part be driven by the pressure to publish for academic survival, poor language and composition abilities, lack of time, or a combination of these factors. Opportunities for plagiarism are increasing because of the greater availability of source materials through online resources. Whereas the full extent of plagiarism in biomedical literature is unknown because only glaring examples tend to be spotted, it is now becoming easier to detect copy-paste plagiarism of text through the use of software, some applications for which are freely available. [sup][2] Curiously, a large proportion of journals does not have a policy in place to address plagiarism. In December 2011, Bosch et al . [sup][3] surveyed the misconduct policies of 399 high-impact biomedical journals in 27 biomedical categories of the Journal Citation Reports. They found that plagiarism was explicitly mentioned by only 56% of the journals, and plagiarism-checking services were used by only 28%. The Indian Journal of Psychiatry did not have a formal plagiarism policy, earlier. However, there were two events which led to a revision of editorial policy. One was the identification of an almost word-for-word reproduction of an entire article on poverty, social stress, and mental health from one Indian journal [sup][4] to another. [sup][5] The other was the identification of the reproduction of significant quantities of text from a previously published book into a review in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, earlier this year. Fortunately, the latter instance of plagiarism was detected immediately after the journal was posted online and before the print issues were commissioned, and so it was possible for the article to be removed from both online and print editions of the journal. In order that we do not face similar problems in the future, the Indian Journal of Psychiatry is instituting a policy on plagiarism. The Journal defines plagiarism as follows: *Plagiarism of ideas is the presentation of the ideas of another author or group of authors without reference to the source. *Plagiarism of text is the presentation of one or more sentences of text from another source without reference to the source. *Self-plagiarism is the reproduction of one's own ideas, data, or text without reference to the source. In this context, plagiarism will include a full sentence that is identical with that in another source, or several sentences in sequence that are substantially identical with those in another source. …