Publishing and Ethical Submission Concerns—Editorial

Women & Criminal Justice has had to handle a few publication ethics concerns in recent years. In recent weeks, for example, a person asked a member of our managing publication team at Taylor & Francis, the journal’s publisher, what percentage of a manuscript can be plagiarized. The short answer is “zero.” Taylor & Francis is a member of COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics. COPE provides publishers, journal editors and interested individuals with information, and appropriate responses and protocols to follow if there is a publishing ethical concern. Publication ethical concerns may arise before or after a paper has been accepted and published by a journal. Some of the common concerns that editors of academic journals may face are simultaneous submissions, plagiarism and self-plagiarism. This editorial will discuss these ethical violation concerns in the hopes that authors who submit a paper for publication to Women & Criminal Justice will comport with our journal’s commitment to maintaining COPE publication ethical standards and guidelines.

To write this editorial, Women & Criminal Justice asked members of its editorial board and the senior editor at 20 crime and justice journals if they have found instances of plagiarism when reviewing manuscripts submitted for publication. Half of the editorial board members and nine journal editors responded to the short inquiry about publication ethics. The majority of these board members and editors are full time faculty at a 4-year university that offers graduate degrees, are full professors, and did not complete a review for Women & Criminal Justice in the past two years. The majority of these scholars have never published a paper on publication ethics but almost all have worked with doctoral students and discuss publication ethics with their students. Seven out of 10 editors have experienced a publication ethical problem while they have been editor (many of these editors have been serving for less than 5 years).

SUBMISSION OF A MANUSCRIPT TO ONLY ONE JOURNAL FOR PUBLICATION CONSIDERATION

Academic journals, such as Women & Criminal Justice, require authors to submit a manuscript to one journal at a time. Simultaneous submissions can lead to intellectual property infringement when one journal publishes the paper before the other. Because academic journal publishers do not charge authors to publish a manuscript, the publisher maintains the copyright to the article. Authors assign their copyright in exchange for publishing the paper in a respected peer reviewed outlet. If a dual submission paper is published by another journal, then the second journal has infringed on the copyright held by the first journal. For some authors, a dual submission is an honest mistake and when it is discovered the authors are apologetic and will remove their paper from consideration by the second journal. Other authors may mistakenly think that they own their intellectual property. They might think they own the intellectual property rights because they paid the publisher to keep their copyright or simply because they wrote both papers, but this thinking is incorrect. The academic discipline expects that papers contribute to the knowledge of the field and dual submissions violate the foundation of academic research. Amsen (2020) states that dual submissions also mischaracterize the value of a publication by overrepresenting the analysis completed on a particular research topic and by mischaracterizing the publication record of an author. Journal editors are expected to honor the rights of the journal that first accepts and publishes a paper and can retract the subsequent paper. Women & Criminal Justice has discovered a few dual submissions when peer reviewers brought it to the attention of the editor. Those papers were rejected. The editor then contacted the senior editor of the other journal to let him or her know that the dual submission paper to Women & Criminal Justice would not be accepted and the review process ended.

PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is the taking of another person’s work without attribution; it is considered the theft of another’s intellectual property. Maurer et al. (2006, pp. 1050–1051), citing Plagiarism.org (2006), stated that the common forms of plagiarism include:

• turning in someone else's work as your own

• copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit

• failing to put a quotation in quotation marks

• giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation

• changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit

• copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not [Plagiarism.org 2006].

In the past five years, three editors surveyed and four members of the editorial board who performed manuscript journal reviews (not necessarily for Women & Criminal Justice) reported instances of plagiarism. Board members said that if they suspected a plagiarized paper then they reported it to the journal’s editor and recommended against publication. Editors who had an allegation of plagiarism reported to them by a reviewer or detected it during the initial check-in process said that they retracted accepted papers or rejected papers which were still in the review process.

When an allegation of plagiarism is reported to Women & Criminal Justice, we undertake a comparison of the work submitted to the journal with the paper deemed to be copied. In addition to a direct paper-to-paper review, the journal will use the publisher’s software and generate a duplication report that compares the two works. While electronic plagiarism checker tools are reliable, it is still important to do a paper-to-paper evaluation. Maurer et al. (2006) indicated that authors who plagiarize might try and use synonyms, even using a word document synonym tool to generate “different” terms, so as to modify sentences so they appear to be different. Some of these authors might erroneously believe that if they change a few words or phrases that they have not committed plagiarism. This is in error because even paraphrased work must be attributed to the first author whose ideas and words have been used; too, a slight change in wording does not alleviate it from being viewed as a direct copy if the changed wording is slight. Authors should give credit to another author’s work, period. Cite, cite, cite. Authors must be credited for their work; citing the prior work solves any intellectual theft concerns, ensures that the later work is moving the field’s base of knowledge forward and, allows readers to find and read the original work. Women & Criminal Justice will reject papers that are plagiarized during the review process and retract papers if they had been accepted. It is never acceptable to plagiarize.

SELF-PLAGIARISM

Self-plagiarism is “text recycling;” authors use the same words, sentencing, paragraphs or more of a prior publication. According to Saver (2014), some authors erroneously believe that if they wrote a paper that they own its intellectual property. However, authors usually assign their copyright to publishers in exchange for journals publishing the work. As noted above, the publisher owns the intellectual property. Text recycling is an ethical problem because it violates the intellectual property rights of the publisher. In some cases, authors text recycle the methods section of a paper. It is inevitable if an author is examining a data set used in a previous paper to have some similarities in the methodology section of the subsequent paper. However, authors should not use the same lines and modify only a word or two. If a paper is duplicative in the methods section, some editors might just ask authors to perform a rewrite. Authors will need to explain that the previous study was performed, that there is a unique contribution beyond the subsequent paper by including new variables or testing a different hypothesis or theory. If the subsequent study does include analysis with different variables then authors should take care that they are not engaged in “salami slicing.” Salami slicing is an author’s attempt to slice a data set up into as many pieces as he or she can to maximize publications. However, the later slicing rarely adds anything new to the field; publications are aimed at advancing knowledge, not just the resume of an author. Three of the ten editors who were surveyed for this study had an issue with self-plagiarism within the last five years; and four of the ten editors had an issue of salami slicing where no original material was added to the paper under review than was presented in the previous publication. Among the Women & Criminal Justice board members who had performed journal reviews, six faculty discovered self-plagiarized papers and six found that the papers they reviewed reused data from a previously published work without attribution.

Women & Criminal Justice has experienced some instances of self-plagiarism in the last couple of years: 1) the author did not indicate that the data set was used in a previously published paper by the author; 2) the author did not adequately compare the previous study to the one sent to the journal for review; 3) the author did not adequately reference or cite the prior study. Duplication by the authors were found in the literature review, methodology, data analysis, discussion and conclusion. Authors need to make sure that they indicate that the submission is furthering the research started in an earlier publication. The authors need to fully disclose the prior publication. MacDermid (2018) recommends providing a brief summary of the prior publication with a description of what was done in that paper and how the current paper is different. To comport with a double-blind review, authors can just give a notation that they are withholding their author name within the body of the paper and on the reference page pending an acceptance. Authors might write for example “(AUTHOR NAME WITHHELD FOR BLIND REVIEW).” If accepted, the author can go back and add the citation information prior to a final checklist review by the editor to ready the paper for typesetting. It is a best practice for authors to rewrite their ideas and reorganize the subsequent papers. If a self-plagiarized paper is reported to Women & Criminal Justice, the journal editor will perform a text comparison and have the publisher use a tool to check for similarity. If there is self-plagiarism then the paper will be retracted if previously accepted, or rejected if still under review.

CONCLUSION

Authors can avoid ethical problems that arise from dual publications, plagiarism and self-plagiarism by ensuring that papers are not submitted to more than one journal and that they write and submit original papers. Every paper must contribute to the knowledge in the field. When in doubt, disclose prior publications, distinguish papers, explain how the work contributes to the field’s knowledge, cite works and be transparent about the research.