Plagiarism Policy

Statement of Commitment

IJTIMAIYA is committed to upholding the highest standards of publication ethics and academic integrity. The journal enforces a zero-tolerance policy toward all forms of plagiarism, duplicate submission, and text manipulation.

To maintain scholarly originality and rigor, IJTIMAIYA establishes a strict maximum overall similarity index threshold of 20% for all submitted manuscripts. Any manuscript exceeding this limit will not proceed to peer review until appropriate revisions are made by the authors.

Mandatory Submission of Similarity Report and Screening Guidelines

Authors are required to conduct a self-check and upload an official, full similarity report as a Supplementary File during the initial manuscript submission process.

- Submission without an attached similarity report will be marked as incomplete and returned to the authors for completion prior to desk evaluation.

- The attached report does not replace independent screening. The Editorial Board will independently verify and re-screen all submitted manuscript using the journal’s official plagiarism detection software.

- Manuscript with a similarity rate of 20% or less are checked based on the APA 7th edition referencing style.

Prohibited Types of Misconduct

Even if a manuscript’s overall similarity index falls below 20%, it will still be flagged for misconduct if any of the following practices are detected:

  1. Verbatim Plagiarism: Copying blocks of the text word for word without quotation marks or attribution, regardless of the total percentage.
  2. Self-Plagiarism/Text Recycling: Reusing substantial portions of text, figures, or data from the author’s previously published works without explicit disclosure and citation.
  3. Patchwork/Idea Plagiarism: Adopting the intellectual structure, logical flow, or core concepts of another work while merely substituting words with synonyms.
  4. Text Manipulation/Evasion Tactics: Utilizing hidden characters, zero-width spaces, white-font text, or raw machine translation tricks to bypass Turnitin detection. Detection of evasion tactics results in an immediate and permanent desk rejection.

Misconduct Handling and Penalties

IJTIMAIYA adheres to the guidelines established by the Committee on Publication Ethics when dealing with allegations of plagiarism:

-  Pre-Publication Stage: Immediate rejection of the manuscript and a suspension of submission privileges for all co-authors for 1 to 2 years.

-  Post-Publication Stages:

  1. Formal article retraction
  2. Retraction notice
  3. Watermarking “RETRACTED”
  4. The Editorial Board reserves the right to notify the authors' home institutions, department heads, or funding bodies regarding the ethical violation.