Last updated: June 11, 2026

Publication Misconduct

To respect the intellectual property rights of others and uphold the standards for academic publishing, Baishideng Publishing Group (BPG) adheres to 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. According to the definition of research misconduct by the US Office of Research Integrity (https://ori.hhs.gov/definition-research-misconduct), we have developed BPG’s definitions, policies and iThenticate 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 the relevant research.

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

4 Inappropriate Authorship: Authorship is not appropriately assigned based on the author’s actual 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 that overlaps substantially with one already published.

7 Salami Publication: Salami publication refers to the practice of slicing data from a large study, which 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.

When credible concerns arise, BPG will conduct an investigation and give the authors an opportunity to respond. If publication misconduct is confirmed, appropriate actions may include rejection, retraction, notification of relevant institutions or funders, temporary submission restrictions, and publication of relevant notices in accordance with applicable laws, privacy requirements, and publication ethics guidelines.

In addition, to fight against plagiarism and to ensure high ethical standards for all of its published papers, BPG joined iThenticate in 2014. iThenticate (http://www.ithenticate.com/) is an effective tool for detecting unoriginal content, enabling our editors to preserve the journal's integrity and the authors' copyright. All peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication will undergo similarity detection using iThenticate. In general, reasonable citation is 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 > 30%) is found, we will immediately verify if the manuscript is associated with publication misconduct or not. If publication misconduct is confirmed after investigation, BPG will take appropriate editorial actions in accordance with its publication ethics policies.

We use plagiarism detection