Work submitted to the International Journal of Clinical & Medical Case Reports must be the authors' own and must not be under consideration elsewhere. Submitting the same case to more than one journal at a time, or re-publishing a case already published, is not acceptable.
Every submission is read by an editor before it goes to review, and reviewers are asked to flag text or images that appear to have been published before. Where an editor has reason to doubt the originality of a submission, the manuscript is checked against published literature and the authors are asked to account for the overlap in writing.
The journal does not treat a similarity percentage as a verdict. Methods sentences, standard clinical descriptions and reference lists routinely produce overlap that means nothing; a single copied paragraph of discussion means a great deal. Every case is judged by an editor on what was copied and why.
Before publication, a submission found to contain plagiarised material is rejected and the authors are told why. After publication, the journal follows COPE guidance: the authors and, where appropriate, their institution are contacted, and the outcome may be a correction or a retraction. The article is never quietly removed - the record of what was published stands, with a notice attached. See Corrections & Retractions.
Text produced by a generative AI tool must not be presented as the authors' own writing. AI tools cannot be listed as authors, since they cannot take responsibility for the work. Any use of such a tool in preparing the manuscript must be declared at submission, and the authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy of everything in the article, including its references.