Authors must follow the high ethical standards set for journal authors authorised by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Any ethical transgressions will be taken very seriously, and decisions will be made following COPE guidelines.
The journal features original articles that have not been published in other publications. The journal does not under any circumstances accept or tolerate instances of research misconduct, such as: plagiarisation of academic publications, plagiarisation of scientific results and conclusions, fabrication or falsification, suppression of data, or the repetitive printing of scientific papers (autoplagiarisation). Exceptions can be made only for those new articles that fundamentally supplement earlier publications. The author or authors’ collective must provide information about the repeated use of material.
On the first page of text, the author must provide information about the financial sources for their scientific research and article writing, the declaration of which is compulsory.
The work of other individuals must always be properly acknowledged. The journal does not tolerate instances of authorship misconduct – pseudo authorship, imitation authorship, ghostwriting, unidentified authorship, gift authorship, honorary authorship, mutual admiration authorship, mutual support authorship, self-plagiarism, text-recycling, etc. In order to avoid such cases, authors are advised to follow the instructions in COPE and CSE documents (https://publicationethics.org/files/2003pdf12_0.pdf; https://publicationethics.org/files/ghost-authorship-submitted-manuscript-cope-flowchart.pdf; https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/resource-library/editorial-policies/publication-ethics/).
All researchers mentioned in the list of authors share collective liability for their research results and the article’s content. All individuals having significantly contributed to the writing of the article must be included in the list of authors, ranking them according to their extent of involvement in conducting the research and writing the text, not by alphabetical order. The individual who contributed most to the publication’s preparation must be named as the first author. If all the authors think that their contributions are of equal weight, this must be indicated in a footnote, in which case the authors are listed according to alphabetical order. When the typed text is submitted for printing, no further changes can be made to authorship or the order in which the authors are listed.
Authors must ensure that all data used in the article is reliable and accurate. Comprehensive footnotes and information must be provided so that other researchers may repeat the study or check its validity. Authors are liable for providing the necessary and correct reference notes in their manuscript, and that the presented research data, results, citations, references, visual and (or) other material is not fabricated, falsified or manipulated. Failure to indicate literature or sources that were used (including illustrations, tables and other appendices) is prohibited. Information gained in conversations, correspondence, discussions or using the manuscripts of third parties can be presented only with the prior permission of these individuals, indicating their name, surname, and the date the information was sourced.
Before presenting an article for publication, authors must gather the necessary permission from research participants to give the journal’s publishers the chance to use any related data so as to protect the research participants’ rights to privacy.
We trust that authors will use inclusive language. The content of publications should not contain any words that would imply that some people are better than others in terms of culture, race, sex, ability, disability, sexual orientation or nationality. It is recommended to avoid using terms in authors’ texts that offend, or that disparage or alienate certain groups.