Plagiarism policy

What counts as plagiarism

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as your own, or presenting your own earlier work as new. It includes:

• Copying text from any source without quotation marks and a citation, whether a sentence or a whole section.
• Close paraphrasing: rewording a source while keeping its structure and argument, without citing it.
• Taking ideas, data, tables, figures or images from others without credit, including from theses, conference papers and websites.
• Translation plagiarism: translating a published work from another language and presenting it as original.
• Self-plagiarism: reusing text, data or findings from your own published work without citing it.
• Duplicate submission or publication: sending the same manuscript, or a lightly changed version of it, to BJIM and another journal, or publishing it twice.
• Undisclosed AI-generated text: submitting text produced by a generative AI tool as your own writing without saying so.

How we check

• Every submission is run through plagiarism detection software at the screening stage, before any reviewer sees it.
• The editor reads the similarity report itself, not only the overall percentage. Properly quoted and cited passages, the reference list, and standard phrases such as names of methods or instruments are not plagiarism.
• Manuscripts flagged by the software get a close editorial review, and the editor decides whether the overlap amounts to plagiarism.
• Revised manuscripts may be checked again.

What happens when plagiarism is found

In serious cases, the authors may be barred from submitting to BJIM in future, and the journal may tell the authors’ institutions.

How to avoid problems

• Put copied words in quotation marks and cite the source with a page number.
• When you paraphrase, write the idea in your own words and sentence structure, and still cite the source.
• Cite your own earlier papers, theses and conference presentations when you build on them. If the new manuscript grows out of a thesis, say so in the cover note to the editor.
• Keep notes of where every quotation, figure and data set came from while you write.
• Describe any use of generative AI tools in your methods, and cite the tool.
• Follow the citation guidelines (APA 7th edition).

For reviewers and readers

If you suspect plagiarism in a manuscript you are reviewing, tell the editor in your confidential comments rather than in the comments for the author. If you find it in a published article, write to the editorial office at bjim@buk.edu.ng with the details. Reports are handled in confidence.