LEAD takes plagiarism issues very seriously.  According to American Association of University Professors (2001), plagiarism is defined as “taking over the ideas, methods, or written words of another, without acknowledgment and with the intention that they are taken as the work of the deceiver”. There are several common types of academic misconducts that are classified as plagiarism (taken directly from “Avoiding Plagiarism, Self-Plagiarism, and other Questionable Writing Practices: a Guide to Ethical Writing” by Michael Roig, 2015. 

1. Plagiarism of ideas: Appropriating someone else’s idea (e.g., an explanation, a theory, a conclusion, a hypothesis, a metaphor) in whole or in part, or with superficial modifications without giving credit to its originator.
2. Plagiarism of text: Copying a portion of text from another source without giving appropriate credit to its author.
3. Inappropriate paraphrasing: Taking portions of text from one or more sources, crediting the author/s, but only making ‘cosmetic’ changes to the borrowed material, such as changing one or two words, simply rearranging the order, voice (i.e., active vs passive) and/or tense of the sentences is NOT paraphrasing.
4. Self-plagiarism: In the context of research, self-plagiarism refers to authors who reuse their own previous disseminated content and pass it off as a new “product” without letting the reader know that this material has appeared previously. Thus, this plagiarism misleads the reader about the novelty of the material.
5. Duplicate (dual) publication: Duplicate publication generally refers to the practice of submitting a paper with identical or near identical content to more than one journal, without alerting the editors or readers to the existence of its earlier published version.
6. Other questionable writing practices: Neglecting to indicate author’s source of funding, failing to identify a possible conflict of interest, and establishing honorary authorship.

Should we find any type of plagiarism in the submitted manuscript, the paper will be rejected and the author will be suspended for a minimum of 1 year. Unless the author(s) are found committed questionable writing practices, we will send back the paper and the author(s) are encouraged to make revision as required.