The International Journal of Pharmacy and Allied Fields (IJPAF) is committed to upholding the highest standards of academic integrity, originality, and ethical publishing. As part of our publication ethics, plagiarism in any form is strictly prohibited. Authors submitting manuscripts to IJPAF must ensure that their work is entirely original and free from any form of unethical content reuse or misrepresentation.
Plagiarism is defined as the act of presenting someone else's work whether words, ideas, data, images, tables, figures, graphs, or any other form of intellectual property without proper citation or acknowledgment. This includes direct copying (verbatim text), close or improper paraphrasing, mosaic plagiarism (intermixing copied text with original text), and self plagiarism, which involves reusing one’s previously published content without appropriate citation, permission, or justification.
All manuscripts submitted to IJPAF undergo a rigorous plagiarism check using reliable detection software. The journal follows a strict similarity threshold: a maximum overall similarity index of 10% is acceptable, provided that no single source contributes significantly to that percentage. Similarity from a single source should ideally not exceed 2–3%, and matches from references, methodology, or standard terminology may be excluded from calculation, at the editorial team’s discretion.
If a manuscript exceeds the acceptable similarity limit or contains evidence of unethical copying, it will be returned to the authors for revision or outright rejection, depending on the extent of the overlap. In severe or repeated cases, the journal may blacklist the authors for future submissions and report the misconduct to their institutions or funding bodies.
If plagiarism is discovered after publication, the journal will initiate a formal investigation. If confirmed, the article will be retracted immediately, and a retraction notice will be issued on the journal’s website and in the respective issue. The authors names and details may be shared with indexing bodies and relevant authorities.
Authors are solely responsible for the integrity of their submissions and must ensure that all content is appropriately cited and that permission is obtained for all reused materials, including figures and tables. To avoid unintentional plagiarism, authors are encouraged to use plagiarism detection tools before submission and to carefully paraphrase and cite all secondary content.
By submitting to IJPAF, authors affirm that their manuscript is free from plagiarism, has not been previously published, and is not under consideration elsewhere. The editorial office reserves the right to take corrective or punitive actions in accordance with COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines in case of any violation.
If any reader, reviewer, or stakeholder identifies suspected plagiarism in a published article, they must formally notify the editorial office. The complaint must be supported by credible evidence, which includes both the source of the original work and the article in question. Comparative analysis or highlighted similarities are also helpful to aid the review process.
Upon receiving a plagiarism report, the editorial team will conduct a thorough preliminary assessment. If significant overlap or uncredited content is confirmed, the Editor in Chief may either reject the submission (if under review) or initiate an internal review (if already published) involving relevant editorial board members.
The concerned author(s) will be contacted and asked to submit a written explanation within a stipulated timeframe. Failure to respond, or an unsatisfactory justification, will lead to appropriate editorial action, which may include permanent withdrawal of the article from the journal's archives, public notification of the retraction, and communication with indexing databases to update the publication status.
Additionally, the author(s) found responsible for the plagiarism may face a temporary submission ban of up to six months, during which they will not be allowed to submit new manuscripts to IJPAF. In cases of severe or repeated misconduct, the journal reserves the right to impose longer term restrictions or notify the author’s affiliated institutions and research bodies.
All such actions will be overseen in coordination with the Editor in Chief and, when necessary, under the supervision of the author’s institutional head or designated authority, to ensure transparency and accountability.
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