1) Increasing awareness: for the readers and aspiring authors about ill effects of plagiarism on scholarly publications by publishing articles on the relevant issues of plagiarism as frequently as possible.

2) A clear and definitive policy: on plagiarism, easily visible in the ‘Instructions to Authors,’ for every journal. A ‘Zero Tolerance’ approach may be considered appropriate.

3) An author certificate: may preferably endorse that the manuscript is free from plagiarism and be countersigned by the immediate administrative head of the corresponding author.

4) Increased surveillance: every article submitted to a journal, should ideally be subjected to checking for plagiarism by the best possible professional software available. It is important to understand here, that, even the best of software based plagiarism detection tools (PDT) also have certain limitations. Most PDT works by matching texts from several billion internet resources and documents. A basic requirement for any source to be detected by a particular PDT is that the particular source needs to be available in the existing database of the PDT service provider, which depends on the following factors:

a) How old or recent is the source? As numerous new publications are added and updated on a daily basis on the internet, it is virtually impossible to keep track of all latest publications and update and archive them in the database of the PDT service provider instantly. Hence, at any point of time, there would be some recent publications that are not yet archived in the database of the PDT and hence would not be recognized.

b) There may be a database where subscriptions are necessary for access, in which case availability of such resources in the PDT database depends on the subscription status.

c) Permission for web crawling and accessing contents of a database by a PDT service provider is at the discretion of the concerned database owner/controller. Therefore, if a specific resource/database does not allow web crawling of its contents by a particular PDT, then the PDT will not be able to recognize such documents for similarity check.