Plagiarism Policy

“Plagiarism” can occur in two forms: 1) author(s) intentionally copy someone else’s work and claim it to be their own, or 2) author(s) copy her or his own previously published material either in full or in part, without providing appropriate references.

Indian Journal of Mental Health and Neurosciences (IJMHNS) actively checks for plagiarism before starting the review process. Anti-plagiarism software, Turnitin is the tool used to check for plagiarism with a tolerance limit of 20%. If a manuscript uses a text copied directly from another source, this text must be written in quotation marks and original source must be cited.

Turnitin plagiarism software performs comprehensive checks of the text of manuscripts, comparing the text against a broad reference base consisting of all existing publications, every popular article and journal database, as well as the entire Web in general. Upon successfully comparing the text of a manuscript with all these references, it produced a report which highlights the percentage of text that has been plagiarized and the percentage of text that is completely genuine. In cases where the Turnitin plagiarism software detects plagiarism, it also provides the exact source from which the text was copied.

Whenever plagiarism is detected beyond this limit, we reject the submission. If the plagiarism detected is below 20%, we inform the corresponding author on this and request for resubmission of the manuscript. If a revised draft is submitted, we will send it again for peer review.

The journal follows COPE guidelines for handling plagiarism. Authors may refer to the flowcharts provided by COPE by clicking here .