Get Your Article Reviewed Faster by Avoiding Plagiarism
When you publish an article with a prominent academic journal, you are participating in a conversation with your colleagues around the world as well as scholars who came before you and will come after you. Anyone who reads your article should be able to easily identify your unique contributions and the works you have built on to make those contributions. When you follow the citation expectations of your chosen journal, you help your readers understand how your article fits into the academic record and you give credit to those who have helped you on your research journey.
Different fields have their own citation expectations, so be sure to check the submission guidelines of your chosen journal prior to submission. Many journals use plagiarism detection tools to check incoming submissions for high levels of unattributed overlap with previously published work. Be sure to check your own work prior to submitting it instead of relying on a journal’s post-submission plagiarism checks. Plagiarism concerns at this stage can delay your article and put it at risk for outright rejection from the journal.
Below is some advice I offer to authors submitting their articles to the journal SAGE Open. Always check with your chosen journal for expectations around citation style and prior publication, including preprints.
Avoiding Plagiarism: Take care to give credit for both ideas and the words used to describe them. Please do not copy word-for-word what someone else has written without proper attribution. Use quotations or block quotes when you must use someone’s exact words and follow with an in-text citation. When paraphrasing, avoid patchwriting or simply replacing a few words. The full section should be in your own words, so you may need to take a broader look at what needs to be reworked. Here are examples. SAGE Open runs all submissions through a plagiarism software called iThenticate. We will return your manuscript to you if we find continuous overlap with other published sources without proper attribution.
Previously Published Material: SAGE Open does not publish material that has been previously published. This includes material that has been published in another language. For our purposes, theses, dissertations, preprints, and working papers are not previously published, but should still be cited in your SAGE Open submission. If you are submitting research that was previously included in conference proceedings, please review the copyright information. If there is an ISSN, ISBN, and/or indication that copyright has been transferred to the publisher, then SAGE Open will be unable to consider this material.
When building upon your previously published research in your SAGE Open submission, use citations to your previous research and paraphrasing. Avoid piecemeal publication, which occurs when the findings of one study are unnecessarily split into multiple articles. In addition to raising copyright concerns, piecemeal publication can distort the academic record, making it seem like there is more evidence to support a set of findings than there actually is. For this reason, SAGE Open is more likely to allow careful reuse of your previous research in your introduction, literature review, and methods sections than in your results, discussions, and conclusions.
APA Style: Please refer to the APA Style recommendations for references, in-text citations, and labeling of tables and figures.
Authors may also consider using the Plagiarism Check from SAGE Author Services.
