Plagiarism policy

Counteracting plagiarism

Mediaforum journal accepts for publication only original materials, in particular articles that have not been published before and have not been submitted for publication in another journal.

Mediaforum journal uses appropriate software to detect textual borrowings in manuscripts submitted to the editorial board. Manuscripts that contain plagiarism or textual borrowings without reference to the original source are rejected by the editorial board until the article is published in the journal.

Plagiarism before publication

The editorial board of the journal analyzes any case of plagiarism in fact. If plagiarism or textual borrowings are discovered by editors or reviewers at any stage before the publication of the manuscript, the author (s) are warned to rewrite the text or to link to the original source.

Plagiarism after publication

If plagiarism is detected after publication, the editorial board analyzes this fact. If plagiarism is found, the journal will contact the author. Pages that contain plagiarism will be marked in the PDF version. Depending on the extent of the plagiarism, the document may also be deleted.

Recommendations for avoiding plagiarism:

  • Use quotation marks for words taken literally from the source;
  • Do not change parts of the quote in the context of the sentence;
  • Use separate characters for the quote in the quote;
  • Use three dots (space and three dots) for the part of the omitted quotation;
  • Use parentheses for added proper words;
  • Limit the use of direct quotations as much as possible;
  • Try to paraphrase information or summarize information from different sources using your own words.

Autoplagiarism

Some authors may try to use material from previously published articles that have changed only slightly. Each manuscript is protected by copyright after its publication. As the author no longer owns the rights to previously published articles, they should not be repeated. Most editors and reviewers say that plagiarism is unethical. An exception can be made by quoting short phrases of the author from his previous work with the appropriate references to it.