Plagiarism Policy

We have a zero-tolerance policy for plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined as copying text, ideas, images, or data from another source, including your own publications, without crediting the original source. Text copied from another source must be reused between quotes, and the original source must be cited. If the design of a study, or the structure or language of the manuscript, was inspired by previous works, these works must be explicitly cited. We are a member of Crossref, and all submissions are checked for plagiarism with industry-standard plagiarism detection software (iThenticate). The manuscript may be rejected if plagiarism is discovered during the peer review process. If plagiarism is discovered after publication, an investigation will be conducted, and appropriate action will be taken following our policies.

Please visit the SELF-PLAGIARISM Q&A FORUM.

Authorship and AI tools

Read More about the COPE position statement.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or Large Language Models in research publications is expanding rapidly. COPE joins organisations, such as WAME and the JAMA Network, among others, to state that AI tools cannot be listed as the author of a paper.

AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.

Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.