Plagiarism Policy

MATAI: International Journal of Language Education has a zero-tolerance policy towards plagiarism and academic misconduct. All manuscripts submitted to the journal are screened for originality before they are sent to reviewers.

Similarity Screening

Every submission is checked with Turnitin plagiarism detection software at the initial editorial screening stage. Manuscripts with a similarity index above 20% (excluding the bibliography, quotations, and common phrases) are returned to the authors for correction or are rejected outright, depending on the severity of the overlap.

Forms of Plagiarism

The journal considers the following practices to be plagiarism and academic misconduct:

• Verbatim copying of another author's work, in whole or in part, without proper citation;
• Paraphrasing substantial parts of another work without proper attribution;
• Claiming results, data, ideas, or words produced by others as one's own;
• Self-plagiarism (duplicate or redundant publication of the author's own previously published work without proper cross-referencing);
• Data fabrication and falsification.

Sanctions

If plagiarism or misconduct is detected before publication, the manuscript will be rejected and the authors may be barred from submitting to the journal for a defined period. If plagiarism is proven after publication, the article will be retracted in accordance with the journal's Crossmark policy and the COPE guidelines, and a retraction notice will be published and linked to the article.

All cases of suspected plagiarism and misconduct are handled following the flowcharts of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), as described in our Publication Ethics statement.