Everything published by Peer Academics must be the authors' own work, and every borrowing from someone else — or from yourself — must be visible to the reader. This page describes how submissions are screened, how overlap is judged, and what follows when the standard is not met.
What counts as plagiarism
- Verbatim copying of another person's text without quotation marks and a citation. A citation alone does not license a copied sentence; quoted words need quotation marks.
- Paraphrase plagiarism — reproducing someone's argument or structure in reworded form without attribution.
- Mosaic plagiarism — assembling a passage from phrases taken from several sources.
- Appropriation of ideas, data, or design — using another researcher's unpublished hypothesis, dataset, instrument, or method learned through review, supervision, or private communication, without permission and credit.
- Translation plagiarism — translating published work into English and presenting it as new.
- Unattributed machine output — presenting text generated by a software tool as your own writing, which is governed by the Generative AI Policy.
Screening
Every submission is screened with similarity-detection software during editorial screening, before it is sent for review, and a manuscript may be screened again before acceptance and after any substantial revision. The report is read by an editor, never applied mechanically.
No fixed percentage
Peer Academics does not operate a similarity threshold, and no percentage figure will be quoted to you as the reason for a decision. A similarity score measures string matching, not misconduct: a manuscript can score twenty percent on reference lists, standard instrument wording, and legislation quoted in full and be entirely sound, while a single unattributed paragraph at three percent can be plagiarism. The handling editor reads the flagged passages and asks what the overlap consists of, whether the source is cited and quoted properly, whether the overlapping material is the argument or boilerplate, and whether a reader would be misled about who wrote what. Where the answer is unclear, the editor asks you to explain before drawing a conclusion.
Text recycling (self-plagiarism)
Reusing your own previously published words is acceptable in narrow circumstances and must always be disclosed:
- Normally acceptable — a description of an unchanged method, instrument, or study population reused from your own earlier article, kept to what is needed and cited to that article; background definitions in a series of papers from one project; text from your own preprint, thesis, or dissertation.
- Not acceptable — reusing results, discussion, or conclusions; publishing the same study again with a new title, a rearranged dataset, or a different language; dividing one study into several thin articles to increase the number of publications; presenting recycled material as new without citing the earlier work.
Disclose every earlier version, preprint, conference paper, thesis, and closely related article of your own in the comments to the editor at submission, with links, and cite them in the manuscript. Remember that your earlier publisher may hold rights in the text: obtaining any permission needed to reuse it is your responsibility, and the journal cannot publish material you are not free to supply.
Duplicate submission
A manuscript under consideration at another journal may not be submitted to Peer Academics, and a manuscript under consideration here may not be sent elsewhere until you have received a decision or formally withdrawn it. Disclosed preprints are not prior publication; see Publishing Model.
What happens
| When it is found | What the journal does |
|---|---|
| At editorial screening | Minor, correctable attribution problems are returned to you for correction before review. Substantial unattributed copying is declined without review. |
| During review | Review is suspended. You are shown the passages and the source and asked to respond, normally within four weeks. The editor then continues, requires correction, or declines. |
| After acceptance, before publication | Acceptance is withdrawn and the manuscript is not published. |
| After publication | Handled under Publication Ethics: a correction where attribution can be repaired, a retraction where the article is substantially not the authors' own work or duplicates an existing publication. |
In serious cases the journal also informs the authors' institution and, where the work overlaps another publication, that publisher, and may decline submissions from the authors concerned for a stated period. Sanctions are decided by the Editor-in-Chief and are proportionate to what was done: an inexperienced author who quoted carelessly is not treated as someone who copied an article wholesale.
If you are the person whose work was copied
Write to [email protected] with both texts and the passages marked. The journal will examine the claim under the procedure in Publication Ethics and will tell you the outcome, whether or not the article concerned is one of its own.