Allegations of Misconduct
Allegations of Misconduct
1. Following are construed as a Misconduct:
- Fabrication: making up review, data or results and recording or reporting them
- Falsification: manipulating research materials and methods, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the submission
- Plagiarism: the claim and/or appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or expressions without giving appropriate credit.
It does not include honest error or differences of opinion. If misconduct is suspected, editors will act in accordance with the relevant internationally accepted guidelines.
If, after assessing the available evidence, the editor has concerns about a submission, a response will be sought from the authors. If the editors find the response unsatisfactory, the editors may take suitable action including writing to employee instructional head and the funding agency.
In cases of published plagiarism or dual publication, an announcement will be made in EES explaining the situation, including 'retractions' if work is proven to be fraudulent. In such cases editors will act in accordance with the relevant internationally accepted guidelines. The other journal will be informed in case of dual publication.
2. Prior submission and redundant publication
EES only considers article submissions which has not been published previously. Authors are to make a declaration to this effect prior to release of their work. In addition, it is not acceptable for an author to submit a manuscript (or manuscripts describing essentially the same matter) to more than one journal at a time. However, prior release (or publication) in some recognised forms is permitted (see, below).
It is important to ensure that research work is only published once. If it is published more than once, it might cause problems in systems which use the number of publications to assess an individual’s or an institute’s research output.
Conference presentations or posting unrefereed manuscripts on preprint servers are not considered prior release (or publication) and are therefore permitted. There may be situations where previously released (or published) work is included in summary form, but it must be made clear to the editor on submission that this is the case. Publication of an abstract at a meeting does not preclude later submission of the full article to EES. Submissions containing material that has previously formed part of a Master's, MPhil, PhD or other academic thesis which has been published according to the requirements of the institution awarding the qualification is not considered as prior release (or publication). However, covering letter will clearly indicate such a case.
It is called redundant publication, duplicate publication and text recycling, where authors reproduce verbatim content from their other publications (occasionally referred as self-plagiarism); it is not permitted. When this is identified editors will follow the relevant internationally accepted guidelines and consider publishing a notice of redundant publication.
Minor overlap or a small amount of redundancy may be unavoidable. This must always be reported transparently and be properly attributed and compliant with copyright requirements. In research articles, some degree of text recycling in the background/ introduction/ methods section of an article may be reasonable. However, overlap in the methods, analysis, results and conclusions section will not be acceptable. In review articles, if text is recycled from an earlier publication without any further novel development of previously published opinions or ideas or when they are presented as novel without any reference to previous publications, it will not be acceptable.
Source: Adapted from Royal Society, "Misconduct and redundant publication"
