We study two sufficient conditions that imply global injectivity for a $C^1$ map $X\colon \R^2\to \R^2$ such that its Jacobian at any point of $\R^2$ is not zero. One is based on the notion of half-Reeb component and the other on the Palais--Smale condition. We improve the first condition using the notion of inseparable leaves. We provide a new proof of the sufficiency of the second condition. We prove that both conditions are not equivalent, more precisely we show that the Palais--Smale condition implies the nonexistence of inseparable leaves, but the converse is not true. Finally, we show that the Palais--Smale condition it is not a necessary condition for the global injectivity of the map $X$.