Exclusive Publication

Duplicate Publication & Submission

The Journal publishes original content; therefore, authors should avoid submitting any work that has been published previously in whole or in part. This includes, but is not limited to, symposia, transactions, and books. (Note: Exceptions are made for published abstracts of 400 words or less or for poster presentations at scientific meetings. However, these works should not have been widely circulated, copyrighted, or sold.)

The Journal does not support the practice of reporting the results of a single study over two or more papers, resulting in substantive overlapping content. There may be exceptions when a second paper is worthwhile. In the cover letter, the authors must explain how the paper extends understanding of the previous work. In addition, the new manuscript must explicitly reference the other work(s).

Authors should also avoid submitting the same paper to more than one journal at a time. This practice burdens The Journal’s limited personnel and reviewers and risks the potential for duplicate publication.

On acceptance of a paper, all authors must confirm that they have not submitted or published the paper elsewhere by signing our Conditions for Publication form.

Plagiarism

The Journal staff and expert reviewers screen all submissions for similarity to the work of other authors. Papers that include others’ ideas or their text, tables, or figures without crediting the original source—that is, plagiarism—will be immediately rejected. When content reuse appears inadvertent or minor, the editors may ask the authors to rewrite passages, give appropriate attribution to the previous work, and obtain permissions for reuse, as needed.

Authors should also avoid reusing large portions of their previously published works without citing them. This practice, known as self-plagiarism, impairs our goal to publish original works. Exceptions may include previously described methods, in which case the previous work can sometimes be referenced.

Preprints

To quickly disseminate important information to the public, authors have been encouraged to upload papers that have not been formally reviewed to preprint servers. These papers are usually assigned an accession number or digital object identifier (DOI), are discoverable, and are freely available to view.

The Journal follows these practices for preprints:

• On submission, authors must clearly state that the manuscript is a preprint and provide the accession number or DOI. The Journal editors will decide if reviewing the work is worthwhile.
• Preprints that have been indexed by entities such as MEDLINE or PubMed will not be considered for publication.
• On acceptance, authors must update the preprint title page to include a statement that The Journal article is the version of record, along with the full citation and DOI.

Embargos

Articles published in The Journal are embargoed until they are published online at THIJ.org. The article contents should not be reported in press releases, news stories, or social media before then. Authors will be given the opportunity to prepare for news releases approximately 10 days before publication.