Dear colleagues

As academicians it is imperative that we have adequate number of scientific publications in reputed journals to our credit. Unfortunately we are coming across many instances of plagiarism and duplication not only in our journal but also in many other journals.

Plagiarism and duplication of articles are two issues that plague the scientific community or rather the scientific publishing industry world over.

According to Wikipedia “plagiarism is the wrongful appropriation and publication of another author’s language, thoughts, ideas or expressions and the representation of them as ones own original work”. And “duplication generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or appreciably similar”. In other words duplication is submitting a similar article to more than one journal. The reasoning amongst some authors for duplication is as the review process takes a long time, once the article gets accepted in some journal it can be withdrawn from other journals. This does not always happen. Therefore the same article can get published twice. But there are other authors who would want to submit the same article albeit with minor changes in the title or other areas in different journals. This is unpardonable and a serious breach of professional and publishing ethics and a breach of the copyright form.

The editorial office has decided to take action against the authors depending on the severity of plagiarism and duplication. It can range from retraction of the article to prohibiting the author from submitting further articles to our journals for 3 years.

Therefore I appeal to all our authors to submit original articles and case reports as the new policy of our journal does not tolerate plagiarism and duplication.