Review and Plagiarism Policy

All papers submitted to the PiCES journal undergo a thorough and strict review. All steps involved can be seen in the figure below.

                       

Here are the steps summed up:

1) All papers submitted to PiCES are first scrutinized by the editorial team for plagiarism and also language to make sure entries are in the English language.

2) PiCES follows a very strict PLAGIARISM policy. All papers are screened using either the iThenticate or the Plagiarism Checker X software. In case the plagiarism is found to be less than 20% the paper moves to the next round. If not, the paper is rejected and is intimated to the author. 

a) It must be noted that the 20% rule is not a hard and fast one. In case the plagiarism detected is in references or in commonly used sentences, we will ask authors simply to re-write the commonly used sentences and ignore the plagiarism flagged due to references. The paper will be given a SECOND chance.

b) On the contrary, in case we find that the plagiarism level obtained is less than 20% but the results and/or conclusions and/or major experimentation is a blatant copy of another work, the paper WILL BE REJECTED irrespective of the 20% rule.

Hence, it must be noted that we shall not depend only on the plagiarism tools to weed out plagiarism!

3) The paper then will be stripped of the authors names and affiliations to assist in a double blind review and are assigned a minimum of two peer reviewers from our peer review panel. Since the review is double blind, the authors at any point of time will not know identity of who actually reviews their paper. 

4) Review is conducted on a 11 point review system which assesses technical content, relevance to the latest research and also to the journal, English grammar, presentation, literature survey performed, experiments conducted and also results obtained (in case not a survey paper). The reviewers can also intimate to us any other comments they observed about the paper inclusive of improvements.

5) Once the review is submitted, our editorial team goes through the reviews given by the reviewers and takes into account their judgement to decide whether the paper can be accepted or rejected. In case the judgement received is indecisive, the paper will then move on to our editorial committee who will help the editor in chief to take a final decision.

6) In case the paper is accepted, the authors are then intimated of their reviews and are asked to make corrections (if any). The authors will have to then submit a final camera ready copy which will then be pushed to publication. Prior to this step, all papers are once again subjected to a SECOND ROUND of plagiarism checks to make sure the new content added is not plagiarised.

7) After a paper goes through all these rounds, the papers are published on the 5th of every month in the latest issue of PiCES!

The total duration to complete this process varies in between 8 - 12 weeks on an average. We will keep you informed at every stage.