Publication Ethics

Editors’ Responsibilities

  • The editor of a journal holds a vital position taking important editorial decisions on all peer-reviewed submitted for publication.
  • The editor should maintain the transparency of the academic research & record, preclude professional needs from cooperating with ethical standards, and always be willing to publish retractions, rectifications, and erratum when required.
  • The editor should assess manuscripts for their scientific quality and intellectual content, free from any sort of biased decisions based on discrimination of race, gender, geographical origin, or religion of the author(s). The editor should evaluate manuscripts objectively based on their academic merit free of any commercial or self-interests.
  • The editor should not disclose any information on submitted manuscripts before publication of the manuscript.
  • Promoting research rectitude must be preserved. If at any stage the publisher suspects any kind of misconduct in research, it should be investigated promptly in detail with suitable authority; and if any suspicious act of misconduct is observed in the peer review, it should be resolved with diligence.

Reviewers’ Responsibilities

  • Providing a detailed, constructive, and unbiased evaluation in a timely manner on the scientific content of the work.
  • Indicating whether the writing is relevant, concise & clear and evaluating the originality and scientific accuracy.
  • Maintaining the confidentiality of the complete review process.
  • Notifying the journal editor about any financial or personal conflict of interest and declining to review the manuscript when a possibility of such a conflict exists.
  • Notifying the journal editor of any ethical concerns in their evaluation of submitted manuscripts; such as any violation of ethical treatment of animal or human subjects or any considerable similarity between the previously published article and any reviewed manuscript.

Authors’ Responsibilities

  • All the work reported in the manuscript must be original and free from any kind of plagiarism.

           Originality and Plagiarism

  • The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.
  • Plagiarism is defined as ‘using someone else’s ideas, words, data, or other material produced by them without acknowledgement’. Plagiarism can occur in respect to all types of sources and media, including text, illustrations, , computer code, material downloaded from websites or drawn from manuscripts or other media; published and unpublished material, including lectures, presentations and grey literature.

       Plagiarism checking is mandatory in our publication. We reserve the right to check all submissions through appropriate plagiarism-checking tools (iThenticate). Submissions containing suspected plagiarism, in whole or part, will be rejected.

  • The work should not have been published elsewhere or submitted to any other journal(s) at the same time.

Duplicate, redundant or concurrent publication

  • Duplicate or redundant publication, or ‘self-plagiarism’, occurs when a work, or substantial parts of a work, is published more than once by the author(s) of the work without appropriate cross-referencing or justification for the overlap. This can be in the same or a different language. We do not support substantial overlap between publications, unless: it is felt that editorially this will strengthen the academic discourse; and we have clear approval from the original publication; and we include citation of the original source.
  • When authors submit manuscripts to our journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless a journal is explicit that it does not have an exclusive submission policy. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow COPE Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
  • Parallel submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.
  • Any manuscript based on a thesis should be a reworking of the material in the thesis and written to conform to the journal’s style guide or relevant book guidance. When quoting from the thesis or reusing figures, authors should avoid self-plagiarism by citing and referencing any extracts copied or adapted from the thesis appropriately. If a thesis was published by a publisher and is publicly accessible, permission may be required from the thesis publisher before submitting to a journal. The relevant editor should be informed that the manuscript draws on a thesis in the cover letter.
  • Any potential conflict of interest must be clearly acknowledged so that it doess not interfere with the objectivity or integrity of a publication..
  • Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the presentation, review or publication of a piece of work. These may be financial, non-financial, professional, contractual or personal in nature.
  • At the end of the main text, all authors should include in their manuscript a funding declaration in addition to a competing interest declaration.
  • All sources of financial support for the research project should be disclosed.

Acknowledgment of sources

Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should also cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work.

  • Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study, drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and/or Final approval of the version to be published; and Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
  • All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co- authors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be named in an Acknowledgement section. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors (according to the above definition) and no inappropriate co-authors are included in the author list of the manuscript, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication. All co-authors must be clearly indicated as of the moment of manuscript submission. Adding co-authors at a later stage will not be accepted.
  • The corresponding author’s specific responsibilities include:
  • Manuscript correction and proofreading. Handling the revisions and re-submission of revised manuscripts up to the acceptance of the manuscripts.
  • Agreeing to and signing the Author Publishing Agreement on behalf of relevant co-authors and/or arranging for any third-party copyright owners’ signature;
  • Arranging for payment of an APC (article processing charge) where one is required. The affiliation of the corresponding author is used to determine eligibility for discounted or waived APCs under Open Access Agreements.
  • Acting on behalf of all co-authors in responding to queries from all sources post-publication, including questions relating to publishing ethics, reuse of content, or the availability of data, materials, resources, etc

Affiliations

  • Any article affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.

Research with Humans or Animals

  • Research involving humans or animals should be approved by relevant ethics committee(s) and should conform to international ethical and legal standards for research. We also expect authors to respect human participants’ right to privacy, and to gain any necessary consent to publish before submitting to us. For information on whether authors are required to submit or include evidence regarding the above, please consult individual journal submission guidelines or contact the relevant book or journal editor.

Ethical conduct of research

  • Work involving humans should comply with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki, as revised in 2013. At the end of the main text, the manuscript should contain a statement that the study has been approved by the Ethical Committee of the institution where the study was performed, and that the study subjects, or their legal guardians, gave informed consent for participation in the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. Please note the Journal´s Author Statement Information for further details and orientation in the formulation.

Transparency

We strive to follow COPE’s Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing and encourage our publishing partners to uphold these same principles.

Data and Supporting Evidence

  • We support transparency around data, and other materials associated with research. We expect authors to maintain accurate records of supporting evidence necessary to allow others to understand, verify, and replicate new findings, and to supply or provide access to this supporting evidence, on reasonable request. Where appropriate and where allowed by their employer, funding body or others who might have an interest, we encourage authors to deposit evidence in a suitable repository or storage location, for sharing and further use by others; and describe where the evidence may be found in a Data Availability Statement which authors should include in their publication.
  • Our publications also permit authors to submit and publish supplementary materials that are not essential for inclusion or that cannot be accommodated in the main text, but that would be of benefit to the reader. Unless otherwise stated, it should be assumed that data, code, and other materials or supplementary files will not be peer-reviewed.

Integrity of Record

We maintain a record of the existence of everything we publish with information (metadata) describing each publication. If our content is deemed not to comply with the laws of a sovereign nation, we make every effort to ensure the metadata remain accessible within that jurisdiction. Where we are obliged to alter the publication record in any way, such as in the case of research misconduct leading to retraction of a publication, we preserve the academic record as far possible.

Advertising

Till now not allowable.

We encourage authors to list anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship in an Acknowledgments section in their publication with permission, for example to recognize the contributions of anyone who provided research or writing assistance.

  • Proper acknowledgements to other work reported (individual/company/institution) must be given. Permission must be obtained from any content used from other sources.
  • Only those who have made any substantial contribution to the interpretation or composition of the submitted work, should be listed as ‘Authors’. While other contributors should be mentioned as ‘co-authors’.

We expect our readers, reviewers and editors to raise any suspicions of any publication, either by contacting the relevant editor or by emailing smj2019@med.sohag.edu.eg