Concerns concerning research ethics and suspected violations of our publishing ethics policies, both before and after publication, should be reported to the journal. If desired, claimants’ identities will be protected.
Our editors will launch a comprehensive inquiry as soon as we learn about the misbehaviour. The supporting information, pictures, and other supplemental resources may need to be supplied by the writers. Editors will be consulted, and the journal will get in touch with organisations or companies to request an investigation.
The journal will reject an article if it is discovered to have violated its ethical publishing standards, such as by duplicate submission, fake data, plagiarism, citation manipulation, false claim of authorship, etc.
If the article is accepted and is in the “Online first” stage, the journal will remove it from the website and issue a note indicating that the piece has been withdrawn. After review and preliminary acceptance, the authors’ failure to respond to journal correspondence is likewise regarded as a withdrawal of the work. If it is a published article the same will be retracted immediately following the COPE Retraction Guidelines.
The journal follows COPE flow charts (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts) for handling the misconduct.
In addition to that we may take the following actions based on the severity of misconduct;
- Not allowing submission for 1–3 years.
- A prohibition from acting as an editor or reviewer.
- Reporting the misconduct to the author’s institutions, employers and, their funding agencies.
However, the minor unintentional errors by the authors may be corrected by a corrigendum and errors by the publisher by an erratum.