Some of the most significant issues regarding proper conduct in scholarly publications refer to plagiarism, copyrights, and conflicts of interest. There are many other issues, and authors and reviewers are encouraged to consult COPE’s International Standards for Authors (Wager E. & Kleinert S., 2011):
PLAGIARISM AND FALSIFICATION
All work in the manuscript should be free of any plagiarism, falsification, fabrications, or omission of significant material that might mislead the reader.
Plagiarism, deliberate or unintentional, is a serious violation of the most basic trust in publishing. It is generally defined as using someone else’s words, ideas, results, or other original work (not common-knowledge) without proper attribution. It includes a range of unethical behaviors, from deliberately claiming someone else’s work as your own (intellectual theft), to copying sentences or citing results from other works without proper attribution, to paraphrasing someone else’s writings without acknowledgement, to recycling one’s own previous work (self-plagiarism). Self-plagiarism may occur in at least two ways: using identical or nearly identical sentences or paragraphs from earlier writings in subsequent research papers, without proper citation, and creating multiple variations of the same work for submission to different journals without acknowledgement of the other papers. Note that the extensive use of someone else’s work, even when properly attributed, is generally not allowed without the explicit consent of the copyright holder of that work.
Other examples of academic dishonesty include:
- False citation: material should not be attributed to a source from which it has not been obtained.
- False data: data from a survey, experiment or model that has been fabricated or modified
- False authorship: only people who were actively involved in the design, implementation and conclusion of the scholarly work should be listed as authors
- Omitted authors or collaboration: the contributions of each author or collaborator should be explicit.
COPYRIGHTS
Check your manuscript for possible breaches of copyright law (e.g., where permissions are needed for quotations, artwork or tables taken from other publications) and secure the necessary permissions before submission. Upon acceptance of a manuscript all authors must sign a statement that the article is original, is not under review by another journal, has not previously been published elsewhere, and its content has not been anticipated by a previous publication.
Note that copyright is a separate issue from plagiarism. Even when the work of others is properly attributed and cited, the authors may still need to obtain permission to use the previously published material from the holder of its copyright.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Authors should avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflicts of interest throughout the research process. A conflict of interest is some fact known to a participant in the publication process that if revealed later, would make a reasonable reader, reviewer, or editor feel misled or deceived. Conflicts of interest may be personal, commercial, political, academic, or financial. Financial interests may include employment, research funding (received or pending), stock ownership, patents, payment for lectures or travel, consultancies, non-financial support, or any fiduciary interest in a company or organizations. All sources of financial support for the research project should be disclosed to the reader.
Personal relationships (i.e. friend, spouse, family member, current or previous mentor, adversary) with individuals involved in the submission or evaluation of a paper, such as reviewers, editors, or members of the editorial board must be disclosed to the editor in writing. Authors should disclose in the final article’s Acknowledgements any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the design of the research, its results, or its conclusions.
OTHER ISSUES
Avoid anything in the text that might engender retaliatory actions, such as defamation or sexist and biased language that could be interpreted as denigrating to ethnic or other groups.
Manuscripts involving human subjects (surveys, simulations, interviews) should comply with the relevant Human Subject Protocol requirements at the corresponding authors’ organizations.
Authors must notify the editor whether their submitted manuscript, or any similar version of it, has substantial overlap with any of their other manuscripts (e.g., prior publications, conference proceedings, book chapters, papers submitted to other journals) or has appeared in or will appear in a non-refereed publication, conference proceeding, or book chapter.