Plagiarism is the wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or stealing and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work. It is a form of scientific misconduct that has been on the rise in recent times. Although Plagiarism is not only the mere copying of text, but also the presentation of another's ideas as one's own, regardless of the specific words or constructs used to express that idea. In contrast, many so-called plagiarism detection services can only detect blatant word-for-word copies of text.

Self-plagiarism (also known as "recycling fraud") is the reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one?s own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or without citing the original work. Articles of this nature are often referred to as duplicate or multiple publications. In addition to the ethical issue, this can be illegal if copyright of the prior work has been transferred to another entity. Typically, self-plagiarism is only considered to be a serious ethical issue in settings where a publication is asserted to consist of new material, such as in academic publishing or educational assignments. It does not apply (except in the legal sense) to public-interest texts, such as social, professional, and cultural opinions usually published in newspapers and magazines.

In academic fields, self-plagiarism is when an author reuses portions of their own published and copyrighted work in subsequent publications, but without attributing the previous publication. Identifying self-plagiarism is often difficult because limited reuse of material is both legally accepted (as fair use) and ethically accepted.

It is common for university researchers to rephrase and republish their own work, tailoring it for different academic journals and newspaper articles, to disseminate their work to the widest possible interested public. However, it must be borne in mind that these researchers also obey limits: If half an article is the same as a previous one, it will usually be rejected. One of the functions of the process of peer review in academic writing is to prevent this type of "recycling".

The editors of all the journals under SGJ 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, SGJ will carry a notice of the discovery. Depending on the seriousness of the case, SGJ reserves the right to inform the heads of the offending authors? institutions and their funding agencies about the editors? findings.

SGJ 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.

SGJ has facilities that allow vast collections of documents to be compared to each other, making successful detection much more likely. SGJ also utilizes internet search engine to look for certain keywords or key sentences from a suspected document on the World Wide Web. In SGJ, suspected documents are compared to a large collection (corpus) of other documents and attempts to match parts of the suspect document to parts of those in the corpus.