Journal of Pedagogy in Sport and Physical Activity (JPSPA) Editorial Board recognises that plagiarism is not acceptable and therefore establishes the following policy, stating specific actions (penalties) upon identification of plagiarism/similarities in articles submitted for publication in JPSPA. JPSPA will use Turnitin's originality checking software as the tool for detecting similarities in article manuscripts and the final version of articles ready for publication. A maximum of 20% similarity is allowed for the submitted papers. Should we find more than 20 % of the similarity, the article will be returned to the author for correction and resubmission.

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Papers must be original, unpublished, and not pending publication elsewhere.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.

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

Level of Plagiarism

 Minor Plagiarism

A small sentence or short paragraph of another manuscript is plagiarised without any significant data or ideas taken from the other papers or publications.

Punishment: A warning is given to the authors and a request to change the manuscript and properly cite the sources.

 

Intermediate Plagiarism

A significant part of the data, paragraph, or sentence of an article is plagiarised without proper citation to the source.

Punishment: The submitted article is automatically rejected.

 

Severe Plagiarism

A large portion of an article is plagiarized that involves many aspects such as reproducing original results (data, formulation, equation, law, statement, etc.), ideas, and methods presented in other publications.

Punishment: The paper is automatically rejected, and the authors are forbidden to submit further articles to the journal.