Ethics and Misconduct Policy

Publication Misconduct

To respect the intellectual property rights of others and uphold the standards for academics, MRI is adopting a zero-tolerance policy towards papers associated with publication misconduct. Publication misconduct includes plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, inappropriate authorship, duplicate submission/multiple submissions, overlapping publication, and salami publication. we have developed MRI Publication definitions, policies in line with PILA and COPE Committee standards for publication misconduct, which are as follows:

1 Plagiarism: Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person's thoughts, ideas, data, figures, research methods, or words without giving appropriate credit, or the over-citation of another person's published work.

2 Fabrication: Fabrication is the practice of making up data or results without having performed relevant research.

3 Falsification: Falsification is the practice of changing data or results intentionally such that misleading conclusion is drawn.

4 Inappropriate authorship: Authorship is not appropriately assigned based on the author's contributions.

5 Duplicate submission/multiple submissions: Duplicate submission/multiple submissions refers to the practice of submitting the same manuscript or several manuscripts with minor differences (e.g., differences only in title, keywords, abstract, author order, author affiliations, or a small amount of text) to two or more journals at the same time, or submitting to another journal within an agreed or stipulated period.

6 Overlapping publication: Overlapping publication refers to the practice of publishing a paper overlaps substantially with one already published.

7 Salami publication: Salami publication refers to the practice of slicing data from a large study, could have been reported in a single paper, into different pieces and publishing them in two or more articles, all of which cover the same population, methods, and question.

8 Inappropriate authorship: Authorship is not appropriately assigned based on the author's contributions.

9 Cross-checking of references in connection with content.

What if Misconduct Found?

• Reject the manuscript or withdraw the published paper.
• Not accept manuscripts submitted to all MRI Publication journals by the same research team within two years.
• Inform the institution the corresponding author is affiliated with and the funder(s) about such misconduct.
• Release all penalty documents on the DME Journal site.

In addition, to fight against plagiarism and to ensure high ethical standards for all of the published papers, DME Journal has joined Crossref-iThenticate Similarity Check. iThenticate Turnitin is an effective tool for detecting unoriginal content, enabling our editors to preserve the journal's integrity and the authors' copyright.

For accepted manuscripts, we will conduct detection. In general, a reasonable citation was deemed when the number of overlapping words for a paper with the literature does not exceed 200. If a significant amount of overlapping text (e.g., an overlap >5% or a similarity>20%) is found, we will immediately verify if the manuscript is associated with publication misconduct. Once the manuscript is found to have committed publication misconduct, we will immediately impose the penalties mentioned above.