Plagiarism and Use of Artificial Intelligence

Espirales condemns any and all practices that constitute plagiarism, including total or partial copying of texts produced by another author, by Artificial Intelligence or even by its own authorship. Other forms of plagiarism are described in the document “Types of Plagiarism in Research Infographic”, prepared by iThenticate. 

As a preventive measure, Espirales passes all submissions through Smodin in order to detect the similarity index with the database made available by the system. If a percentage greater than 30% is identified, the submission is automatically rejected still in the pre-assessment phase. 

In addition, to ensure scientific production based on good practices and ethical commitment, we recommend that authors follow these steps before submitting their submissions to Espirales:

  • Carefully read the Editorial Policy adopted by the journal;
  • Explicitly reference all data obtained, analyzed and/or interpreted from other publications; 
  • Cite and reference any intellectual content of another authorship;
  • Indicate as author only those who participated in a direct and substantial manner in all stages of production of the work (research and writing); 
  • Do not omit from the list of authors the names of people involved in the production of the work.

It is also important to take into account that we do not condemn Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and we understand that they can be useful, as long as they do not supplant human authorship and their use is limited to the following objectives:

  • Orthographic and grammatical proofreading;
  • Improvement of writing; 
  • The choice of words;
  • Translation of abstracts, titles and/or keywords;
  • Help with interview transcription. 

The use of AI for the elaboration of original content without any recognition of this purpose is considered a violation of the principles of integrity in research and ethical failure in the production of scientific knowledge. If the misuse of such tools is identified, the journal reserves the right to retract the published text.

It is up to the authors to inform any use of AI-generated content in the preparation of their manuscripts, indicating in a footnote, on the first page of the development, which tool was used and for what purpose (e.g. spelling review, translation, systematization of quantitative data, etc.). Additionally, it is the duty of the scientific community to ensure the appreciation of human authorship and the good use of technological resources. 

On this point, we recommend consulting the following additional materials: