To protect the rights and interests of readers and preserve the quality and reputation of Electric Power Construction, the journal will strictly conduct testing and screening of papers during the publication process. Papers confirmed to involve academic misconduct will be rejected and dealt with accordingly. The specific testing and identification procedures as well as handling ways are as follows.

1. Testing Methods

The journal uses the Academic Misconduct Testing System to automatically screen papers, with the China Academic Journals Full-text Database as the full-text comparison database. Academic misconduct will be thereby detected such as plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, improper authorship, and duplicate submission of one manuscript to multiple journals.

2. Papers Subject to Testing

1) All accepted or to-be-accepted papers;

2) Papers reported by readers for suspected plagiarism.

3. Identification of Papers with Academic Misconduct

The Academic Misconduct Testing System is used to conduct duplicate content checking on papers. For papers with a duplicate rate of 15% or above, the paper and the comparison papers shall be submitted to peer reviewers to identify the seriousness and form of the duplication, and an Opinion on the Identification and Handling of Similarities between the Submitted Paper and Comparison Papers will be delivered.

The criteria for papers involving academic misconduct are as follows.

1) Verbatim or almost verbatim copying other’ academic achievements in the paper content;

2) Changing the type of others’ academic achievements and passing off others’ completed achievements as one’s own independent achievements; not changing the type of achievements but using the copyright-protected components of the achievements and altering their specific forms of expression, and passing off others’ completed achievements as one’s own independent achievements;

3) Using others’ copy-righted viewpoints to constitute the entire, core or main viewpoints of one’s own paper, and taking others’ copy-righted academic achievements as the main or substantial part of one’s own academic paper;

4) Fabricating or falsifying research results, survey data, experimental data or literature materials in the paper;

5) Citing others’ copy-righted viewpoints, schemes, materials, data, etc., without adding annotations or indicating the sources;

6) Duplicate submission of one manuscript to multiple journals.

4. Handling of Papers Confirmed to Involve Academic Misconduct

1) The editorial department shall, in a prudent manner, timely notify the author of the paper that is finally confirmed to involve academic misconduct, and allow the author to make explanations and defenses before making a handling decision.

2) If the paper has been accepted but not officially published, the author shall be notified that the paper will be directly rejected in the manuscript processing procedure via the official website of the journal, with its acceptance qualification revoked. The author shall be also given a warning.

3) If the paper has been officially published, the author shall be notified in writing, with the acceptance qualification of the paper revoked. The author shall be ordered to return the manuscript fee for this paper. If any reputational or other losses are caused to the journal, the journal reserves the right to pursue further compensation.

4) For authors with serious academic misconduct, the journal will publish a notice disclosing the author’s name, the affiliation, and the withdrawal of the paper at an appropriate time. The incident will be reported to the author’s affiliation and to other scientific and technical journals in the relevant field.

5) For authors who commit serious plagiarism or multiple duplicate submissions or publications, the journal will unconditionally reject all papers authored by them as the first author for a period of 2 consecutive years.

5. Handling of Authors’ Objections

If the author of a paper has objections to the identification and handling results, he/she may submit a written application for review to the editorial department within 10 working days from the date of receiving the notice (applications submitted after the deadline will not be accepted). The editorial department shall invite experts to conduct a re-examination of the paper, issue a final handling opinion, and notify the author of the re-examination result within 20 working days.

The above measures shall come into force on the date of its announcement, and the Editorial Department of Electric Power Construction reserves the right of interpretation.