Plagiarism Policy

Bulletin of Civil Engineering (BCE) applies Zero tolerance towards plagiarism and therefore establishes the following policy stating specific actions (penalties) when plagiarism is identified in an article that is submitted for publication in BCE.

Definition: Plagiarism involves the "use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work."

Policy: Papers must be original, unpublished, and not pending publication elsewhere. Any material taken verbatim from another source needs to be clearly identified as different from the present original text by (1) indentation, (2) use of quotation marks, and (3) identification of the source.

Any text of an amount exceeding fair use standards (herein defined as more than two or three sentences or the equivalent thereof) or any graphic material reproduced from another source requires permission from the copyright holder and, if feasible, the original author(s) and also requires identification of the source; e.g., previous publication.

All submitted manuscripts will be checked of their similarity by Turnitin.

When plagiarism is detected, the Editor in-Chief is responsible for the review of this paper and will agree on measures according to the extent of plagiarism detected in the paper in agreement with the following guidelines:

 Similarity level

BCE practices Zero tolerance towards plagiarism. We use Turnitin to evaluate the similarity index and then the editor decides the case of possible plagiarism (Similarity report will be provided to the author). Editorial board has passed the following actions:
1. Similarity Index above 40%: Article Rejected (due to poor citation and/or poor paraphrasing, article outright rejected, NO RESUBMISSION accepted).
2. Similarity Index (20-39%): Sent back to the author for improvement (provide correct citations to all places of similarity and do a good paraphrasing even if the citation is provided).
3. Similarity index equal or Less than 20%:  Accepted or citation improvement may be required (proper citations must be provided to all outsourced texts).
In case no. 2: the author(s) should revise the article carefully, add required citations, and do a good paraphrasing to the cited text.

Every manuscript that submitted into BCE will be scanned for its similiarity by using Turnitin.