Plagiarism and Turnitin Policy

Journal of Maternal and Child Health makes a serious effort to prevent the existence of plagiarism in its published materials. Plagiarism is the exposing of another person’s thoughts or words as though they were the author’s own, without permission, credit, or acknowledgment, or because of failing to cite the sources properly. Plagiarism is the submission of someone else's work as the author’s own, irrespective of whether it is done intentionally or not. This means that the author has plagiarised even if it happened accidentally through poor note-taking. 

Articles submitted to the Journal of Maternal and Child Health will be screened using Turnitin similarity detection tools to minimize the risk of submitting and publishing plagiarised work. Before submitting articles to reviewers, a member of the editorial team will first check them for similarity/ plagiarism. For the articles submitted to the Journal of Maternal and Child Health to be published, they must have a similarity level of less than 25%. This journal will immediately reject manuscripts if similarity is equal to or more than 25%, even if they fit with the journal’s aims and scope.

Authors should be aware that Turnitin is not the only method of checking for plagiarism and other means are readily available. Plagiarism can take diverse forms, from literal copying to paraphrasing the work of another. The following are typical situations that can lead to plagiarism. First, the author copies another author’s work word by word, wholly or partially, without permission, acknowledging or citing the source. This practice can be identified by comparing the source and the manuscript/work that is suspected of plagiarism.

Second, the author paraphrases words or phrases from the source and crafts them into new sentences within the writing. However, this practice becomes unethical when the author does not properly cite or does not acknowledge the original work/author.

Plagiarism Issues: 

  1. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism are not allowed
  2. The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others that this has been appropriately cited or quoted
  3. An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable
  4. Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work.

Working Process:

  1. Editorial Team checking manuscript on offline and online databases manually (checking proper citation and quotation)
  2. The editorial team checked the manuscript by using Turnitin app. If it is found plagiarism indication (more than 25%), the board will reject the manuscript immediately.