Editorial Policy

Journal of Social Sciences

• Readers can study, download and/or print OPEN access articles at no cost.
• Articles will be licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License, which permits unrestricted distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the work is properly cited.
• Journal of Social Sciences follows the double-blind peer-review procedure   for submitted of all manuscripts. The identity of the reviewers is not disclosed to the authors of the submitted manuscript. The anonymity of reviewers allows for objective assessment of the manuscript by reviewers and is free from any influence by the authors on the reviewer’s comments. Procedure for manuscript management is described in Peer-Review Process.
• Plagiarism Prevention: Journal of Social Sciences uses software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Software checks content against a database of periodicals, the Internet, and a comprehensive article database. It generates a similarity report, highlighting the percentage overlap between the uploaded article and the published material. Any instance of content overlap is further scrutinized for suspected plagiarism according to the publisher’s Editorial Policy.  Journal of Social Sciences allows an overall similarity of 15% for a manuscript to be considered for publication.
• Types of Plagiarism: We all know that scholarly manuscripts are written after thorough review of previously published articles. It is therefore not easy to draw a clear boundary between legitimate representation and plagiarism. However, the following important features can assist in identifying different kinds of plagiarized content. These are:
  1. Reproduction of others words, sentences, ideas or findings as one’s own without proper acknowledgement.
  2. Text recycling, also known as self-plagiarism. It is the author’s use of a previous publication in another paper without proper citation and acknowledgement of the original source.
  3. Paraphrasing poor Copying complete paragraphs and modifying a few words without changing the structure of original sentences or changing the sentence structure but not the words.
  4. Verbatim copying of text without putting quotation marks and not acknowledging the work of the original author.
  5. Properly citing a work but poorly paraphrasing the original text is considered as unintentional plagiarism. Similarly, manuscripts with language somewhere between paraphrasing and quoting are not acceptable. Authors should either paraphrase properly or quote and in both cases, cite the original source.
  6. Higher similarity in the abstract, introduction, materials and methods, and discussion and conclusion sections indicates that the manuscript may contain plagiarized text. Authors can easily explain these parts of the manuscript in many ways. However, technical terms and sometimes standard procedures cannot be rephrased; therefore, Editors must review these sections carefully before making a decision.

  Plagiarism in Manuscripts: Submitted manuscripts, which are found to contain plagiarized text, are rejected.

• Copyrights: Journal of  Social Sciences retains the copyright to the published works.
• It is a condition of publication that manuscripts submitted to this journal have not been published and will not be simultaneously submitted or published elsewhere.
• The authors are allowed to incorporate the article into one or more collective works, and to reproduce the article as incorporated in collective works as long as the original work is properly cited.
• Proofs: Proofs will be dispatched via e-mail and should be returned to the publisher with corrections as quickly as possible, normally within 48 hours of receipt.
• Redundant (multiple) publication/ Re-publication: Abstracts and posters at conferences, results presented at meetings (for example, to inform investigators or participants about findings), and results databases (data without interpretation, discussion, context or conclusions in the form of tables and text to describe data/information where this is not easily presented in tabular form) are not considered to be prior publication.
• Authors who want to publish translations of the articles that have been published elsewhere should ensure that they have appropriate permission(s), should indicate clearly that the material has been translated and re-published, and should indicate clearly the original source of the material.
  The Editor-in-Chief may request copies of related publications if they are concerned about overlap and possible redundancy.
• Disclaimer: Responsibility for the content published in Journal of Social Sciences, including any opinions expressed therein, rests exclusively with the author(s) of such content.