Plagiarism and originality

Plagiarism is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action. Plagiarism includes the following:

• Word-for-word, or almost word-for-word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author’s work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks);
• Copying equations, figures or tables from someone else’s paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism by Turnitin. And, any manuscript that shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected. The acceptable similarity index is ≤20%, with no similarities of >5% with a single reference. In case when plagiarism is discovered in a paper that has already been published by the journal, it will be retracted according to the retraction policy.