You and your co-authors must list all relevant affiliations to attribute where the research or scholarly work was approved and/or supported and/or conducted.

Authorship

Authors listed on an article must meet all of the following criteria:

Defining authorship

It is the collective responsibility of all the individuals who have conducted the work to determine who should be listed as authors, and the order in which authors should be listed.

The journal editor will not decide on order of authorship and cannot arbitrate authorship disputes. Where unresolved disputes between the authors arise, the institution(s) where the work was performed will be asked to investigate.

Please read our guide to defining authorship. It includes details on:

Citations

Research and non-research articles must cite relevant, timely, and verified literature (peer-reviewed, where appropriate) to support any claims made in the article.

You must avoid excessive and inappropriate self-citation or prearrangements among author groups to inappropriately cite each other’s work, as this can be considered a form of misconduct called citation manipulation. Read the COPE guidance on citation manipulation.

If you’re the author of a non-research article (e.g. a Review or Opinion) you should ensure the references you cite are relevant and provide a fair and balanced overview of the current state of research or scholarly work on the topic. Your references should not be unfairly biased towards a particular research group, organization or journal.

If you are unsure about whether to cite a source you should contact the journal editorial office for advice.

Please read our full citation guidance, including instructions on the sources which should be added to your references list and those which should only be cited in the main text of your article.

Competing interests

Please read our guide to competing interests. This includes examples of financial and non-financial competing interests as well as information about the sponsorship of clinical trials.

Corrections, Expressions of Concern, and Retractions

Sometimes after an article has been published, it may be necessary to make a change to the Version of Record (VoR). This will be done after careful consideration by the Editor, who is also supported by IJCEECE to ensure any necessary changes are made in accordance with guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Any necessary changes will be accompanied with a post-publication notice which will be permanently linked to the original article. This can be in the form of a Correction notice, an Expression of Concern, a Retraction and in rare circumstances a Removal. The purpose of this mechanism of making changes which are permanent and transparent is to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record.

Data Availability and Deposition

IJCEECE supports a number of open data initiatives and offers a suite of data-sharing policies.

Data sharing policies

Are you submitting your paper to IJCEECE, and is there a data set associated with your work? It has data-sharing policies that specify how data associated with your article should be shared. The guide to understanding our data sharing policies will help you get to grips with the details and the steps you’ll need to take as an author.

Data repositories

A data repository is a storage space for researchers to deposit data sets associated with their research. And if you’re an author seeking to comply with a journal data sharing policy, you’ll need to identify a suitable repository for your data.

Read our guide to choosing a data repository which includes some generalist repositories you may wish to consider.

Community-endorsed public repositories

Where community-endorsed mandates exist for submission of data to public repositories, authors should submit the datasets to the appropriate repositories and provide the accession numbers (where available) in the paper.

Custom computer codes, software tools, and mathematical algorithms

To enable full assessment of submissions, you must make available on request to Editors and/or reviewers any custom computer codes, software tools, or algorithms which have been used to generate the results and conclusions that are reported in your manuscript.

Designations of Territories

IJCEECE respects its authors’ decisions regarding the designations of territories in its published material.

IJCEECE’s policy is to take a neutral stance in relation to territorial disputes or jurisdictional claims in its published content, including in maps and institutional affiliations.

Where a journal is owned by and published on behalf of a society or other third party, IJCEECE will take into account that Society’s policy on this issue to the extent it differs from its own.

Editor Code of Conduct

IJCEECE provides a home for validated, trusted research from the world’s brightest and best minds. The editor of a journal plays a vital role in advancing knowledge within fields of research. It does this by:

To support this role, our Editor Code of Conduct sets out the minimum standards for IJCEECE editors responsible for decisions on journal content, helping ensure our journals publish quality, trustworthy content.

Funding

IJCEECE requires authors to declare all sources of financial support that helped to cover the expenses associated with the research reported in their article. Examples of these funding sources include:

The funding declaration enables authors to attribute credit to funders and facilitates transparency, especially where the funder may have additional roles or may have contributed to the research study. These contributions would also need to be defined in more detail within the competing interests declaration.

Examples of funding support authors are expected to declare include (but are not limited to):

Authors are expected to declare only the acquired funds and grants that are directly relevant to the work reported in their article. If no funding was obtained for the reported work, authors are also encouraged to declare that no funding was obtained. This ensures transparency and avoids concerns being raised about undeclared funding support. 

Any funding declaration must include the full name(s) of the funding body, the grant number(s), and ideally, the name of the person/group to whom this grant was awarded. As stated above, if the funder also played an active role in the research study, such as the data acquisition or analysis, this should be clearly stated in the competing interests declaration.

Authors must be prepared to provide funding documentation and additional information to the journal office if requested (including, where relevant, information on funding used toward submission and publication fees). Please note that failure to disclose funding may, in some cases, be considered as misconduct and may result in corrective action to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record. Correction or retraction notices (as appropriate) may need to be issued on published articles where inaccuracies or key missing information in the funding statement are identified.

Harassment

IJCEECE will not tolerate any kind of harassment of our authors, editors, reviewers,or staff.

We expect to work in an environment of mutual respect and will work with the IJCEECE ethics and legal teams to address any cases of harassment.

Advice for researchers experiencing harassment: As a researcher, you should expect your work to be scrutinized by the public, policy makers, and campaigners. However, some researchers working on high-profile subjects that attract controversy have also found themselves targeted with online harassment.

To help researchers dealing with these issues, IJCEECE has provided support on how to deal with social media harassment.

Images and Figures

You should only use images and figures in your article if they are relevant and valuable to the work reported. Please refrain from adding purely illustrative content that does not add value to the scholarly work.

Using third party material

As a warranty in the Journal Author Publishing Agreement you make with us, you must obtain the necessary written permission to include material in your article that is owned and held in copyright by a third party, including – but not limited to – any proprietary text, illustration, table, or other material, including data, audio, video, film stills, screenshots, musical notation, and any supplemental material.

Read our guide to using third-party material in your article, including FAQs on requesting permission to reproduce work(s) under copyright.

Obtaining permission to publish identifiable or protected content

Content (e.g. photographs, video or audio recordings, 3D models, illustrations, etc) which can reveal the identity of patients, study participants or study subjects can only be included if they (or parents/guardians if they are underage or considered unable to provide informed consent, or their next of kin if participants are deceased) have provided consent to publish.

If any of this type of content has been obtained from communities where additional permissions are required (e.g. an Elder or community leader in an indigenous community), or from a protected source (e.g. museum collections), then authors must obtain the required permissions for use prior to submission of the manuscript.

Please read our full policies on the use of images and figures.

Misconduct

IJCEECE takes all forms of misconduct seriously and will take all necessary action, in accordance with COPE guidelines, to protect the integrity of the scholarly record.

Examples of misconduct include (but are not limited to):

Peer Review

Articles published in IJCEECE (including its imprints) undergo thorough peer review, and IJCEECE endorse COPE guidelines for reviewers. Journals may operate different peer review processes. Our guide to understanding peer review outlines several different peer review models, including:

IJCEECE publishes a statement describing the model of peer review used by the journal on the journal homepage. A minimum of two independent reviewers is normally required for every research article. The aims and scope of each journal will outline its peer review policy in detail.

The details of the comments as well as the overall recommendations by peer reviewers will be considered by the Editor when making a decision, but ultimate responsibility for acceptance or rejection lies with the Editor.

In accordance with COPE recommendations on ethical editing for new Editors, Editors will assign any submissions they cannot handle (e.g. if they are the author of an article submitted to their own journal) to a member of the Editorial Board or a guest editor.

Please note that IJCEECE do not permit you to recommend peer reviewers.

Confidentiality of peer review

It is a requirement to maintain confidentiality and integrity of the peer review and editorial decision-making process at all stages, complying with data protection regulations (including GDPR). The invited reviewer should declare any competing interest before submitting their report to the journal. If they wish to involve a colleague as a co-reviewer for an article, they should ask the journal editorial office before sharing the manuscript and include their names, affiliation and any relevant competing interests in the comments for Editors when they return their report.

In the process of investigating an ethical query, the submitted manuscript, author, reviewer, and any other person (including whistleblowers) involved will be treated in confidence. During an investigation it may be necessary for the Editor to share information with third parties, such as the ethics committee and/or the authors’ institution.

Plagiarism

Trust and integrity are among what readers value the most in scholarly peer-reviewed journal content. That’s why IJCEECE takes the issue of plagiarism very seriously.

“When somebody presents the work of others (data, words or theories) as if they were his/her own and without proper acknowledgment.”Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

For IJCEECE, this applies to data, images, words or ideas taken from any materials in electronic or print formats without sufficient attribution. The use of any such material, whether direct or indirect, should be properly acknowledged in all instances. You should always cite your source.

Read our plagiarism policies and guidance for authors to find out what plagiarism is (and isn’t) and how you can avoid it.

Preprints, preprint servers, and early reporting of scholarly work

We support the need for authors to share early versions of their work before peer review publication. There are also a number of options for IJCEECE authors to share the final Version of Record of their published article.

Preprints and preprint servers

A preprint, also known as the Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM), is your article before you have submitted it to a journal for peer review. Preprint servers are online repositories that enable you to post this early version of your research paper online.

If you upload your AOM to a non-commercial preprint server, you can subsequently submit the manuscript to a IJCEECE. We do not consider posting on a preprint server to be duplicate publication, and this will not jeopardize consideration for publication.

Sharing your published article

If you’ve published in IJCEECE, there are many ways you can share different versions of your article with colleagues and peers.

Research Ethics and Consent

All research published in IJCEECE must have been conducted according to international and local guidelines ensuring ethically conducted research.

Dependent on your area of research, please read our research ethics guide for STM researchers, or our research ethics guide for AHSS researchers. The guides includes detailed information about the following areas.

Research involving humans

All research studies on humans (individuals, samples or data) must have been performed in accordance with the principles stated in the Declaration of Helsinki.

Prior to starting the study, ethical approval must have been obtained for all protocols from the local institutional review board (IRB) or other appropriate ethics committee to confirm the study meets national and international guidelines for research on humans.

A statement to confirm this ethical approval must be included within the manuscript, which must provide details of the name of the ethics committee and reference/permit numbers where available.

Ethical considerations for different human study designs

The policy on ethical considerations for different human study designs includes:

Participant/patient privacy and informed consent

IJCEECE endorses the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which emphasizes that patients and study participants have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent.

In accordance with the principles outlined in the Nuremberg Code, the Belmont Report, and the American Anthropological Association, informed consent must be voluntarily obtained from the participant who should be fully informed of the study including any of the benefits and risks involved.

Research involving animals, plants, and heritage sites

Studies involving vertebrates or regulated invertebrates (e.g. cephalopods), field studies and other non-experimental research on animals must have been carried out after obtaining approval from the relevant institutional ethics committee or the institutional animal use and care committee.

Research procedures must be carried out in accordance with applicable national or international guidelines. In field studies authors must have also obtained any necessary permits for access to lands.

Authors must include a statement within the manuscript to provide details of the name of the ethics committee(s) which approved the study and include the permit or animal license numbers where available.

Biosafety, biosecurity, and emerging biotechnology

Taylor and Francis journals will only consider research which has been carried out in compliance with institutional biosafety and biosecurity policies, which in turn should be informed by national or international recommendations.

Standards of Reporting

Research should be communicated in a way that supports verification and reproducibility, and as such we encourage authors to provide comprehensive descriptions of their research rationale, protocol, methodology, and analysis.

To aid authors in this, a number of study-design specific consensus-based reporting guidelines have been developed, and we recommend you to use these as guidance prior to submitting your manuscript.

A comprehensive list of reporting guidelines for medicine and health research can be accessed via the EQUATOR network website, and for biosciences research via the MIBBI Foundry portal.

Read our list of key reporting guidelines across different disciplines, as well as requirements for statistical methods reporting, cell line authentication, and nomenclature.

Special Issues, Supplements, Article Collections and Conference Proceedings

In addition to regular journal content, IJCEECE may also publish articles as part of a collection in a special issue, an article collection or a supplement.

Use of Third-Party Material

You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. These materials may include – but are not limited to – text, illustration, photographs, tables, data, audio, video, film stills, screenshots, or musical notation.

The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.

Further resources on our Author Services site provide detailed FAQs on topics such as the use of X (formerly Twitter) quotes and screenshots, the use of images of old paintings, redrawn images and derivative copyright, the quotation of poetry or songs, and guidance on the use of third-party content in open access articles.

Read more information on requesting permission to reproduce work(s) under copyright.

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides a host of exciting opportunities for researchers to speed up and expand their work. IJCEECE supports researchers who want to use AI, in a responsible way, for new forms of content creation and analysis. Examples of its potential uses in research include:

AI ethics and best practice

Artificial intelligence is evolving quickly and additional applications for research are continually being developed. This means that guidelines for the use of AI in research are still evolving too. Please read our guidance on using AI tools in your research and manuscript preparation to understand scenarios where their use may be permissible.

Please bookmark our AI policy to keep up to date with the latest guidance.

Key principles to be aware of when using AI in any part of the research process include:

Above all, however you use AI, it remains your responsibility to make sure that your work meets the highest standards in your field of research.