Publication Ethics

AJCCE expects authors, editors and reviewers to uphold high ethical standards. This page summarises the principles that apply to every submission and publication.

Core principles

Honesty: research is reported accurately and completely.
Originality: submitted work is the authors' own and properly acknowledges the work of others.
Fairness: manuscripts are judged on their academic merit, without regard to the authors' nationality, gender, religion, ethnicity, institutional affiliation or political views.
Confidentiality: manuscripts and review reports are treated as confidential documents.
Transparency: conflicts of interest and sources of funding are disclosed.

Research misconduct

The journal regards the following as misconduct:

fabricating or falsifying data, images or results;
plagiarism in any form, including presenting another person's text, ideas, data or figures as one's own, or reusing one's own published work without acknowledgement;
duplicate or redundant publication, and submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal at the same time;
inappropriate authorship, such as leaving out people who contributed or listing people who did not;
citation manipulation (see the Citation Policy);
any attempt to manipulate the peer-review process.

Handling concerns

The editors examine any allegation of misconduct and give the authors an opportunity to respond. Depending on the outcome, the journal may take appropriate action, such as rejecting the manuscript or correcting or retracting a published article.