Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. All published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is covered under this definition.
Editors of all Merit Research Journals take a very serious view of any evidence of plagiarism including self-plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to them. Every reasonable effort will be made to investigate any allegations of plagiarism brought to their attention, as well as instances that come up during the peer review process. Such behaviour when proven beyond doubt is unacceptable, and will be suitably exposed.
In those instances where in spite of these precautions a case of plagiarism goes undetected in the review process and is discovered after publication, MRJ will carry a notice of the discovery. Depending on the seriousness of the case, MRJ reserves the right to inform the heads of the offending authors’ institutions and their funding agencies about the editors’ findings.
Plagiarism Detection Process
Plagiarism detection is the process of locating instances of plagiarism within a work or document. The widespread use of computers and the advent of the Internet have made it easier to plagiarize the work of others. Most cases of plagiarism are found in academia, where documents are typically essays or reports. However, plagiarism can be found in virtually any field, including scientific papers, art designs, and source code.
MRJ has facilities that allow vast collections of documents to be compared to each other, making successful detection much more likely. MRJ also utilizes internet search engine to look for certain keywords or key sentences from a suspected document on the World Wide Web.