Ethics

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Ethics Policies

Ethics statement and Ethics committee approval

When submitting your paper to the IJCCR, you have to provide an Ethics Statement in the authors’ page. In this statement, authors confirm that they comply with the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity published by the Association of All European Academies (ALLEA) and accessible here. As announced in ALLEA’s  website, the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity serves the European research community as a framework for self-regulation across all scientific and scholarly disciplines and for all research settings. IJCCR ascribes to the 2023 revised edition of the Code, which has included challenges from technological developments, open science, citizen science and social media. The European Commission recognises the Code as the reference document for research integrity for all EU-funded research projects and as a model for organisations and researchers across Europe. The Code was published originally in English on 24 March 2017 and was translated to all official EU languages by the European Commission’s Translational Services and with the support of ALLEA Member Academies.

The IJCCR does not require the authors to submit the Ethics Committee Approval issued by the researchers’ organisations, when available. However, the journal or the reviewers may ask authors to disclose it, if they have any ethical concerns about the research. If authors do not have this document, it might impact the publication decision at any point in the process.

Ethics and malpractice

The IJCCR aims to comply with the highest standards of ethical practice in economics and social sciences and to improve our publication process for this purpose. We try to objectively ensure the quality and scientificity of all contributions we publish. We follow the ethical guidance of ALLEA.

Unethical practices are unacceptable. We urge all parts of the publication process to follow the standards of ethical practices of ALLEA. 

Ethical responsibilities of authors

Authors must list all relevant persons as authors and no one else. The authors are the persons who contributed significantly to the experimental design, its implementation or analysis and interpretation of the data, to the writing of the manuscript at draft and any revision stages. They should all approve the final version. All persons who contributed significantly to the writing of the manuscript are considered an author; “ghost writers” are prohibited by the journal. Any person who made less significant contributions to the paper should be acknowledged in a footnote at the beginning of the paper. The IJCCR is very careful regarding authorship misconduct. 

Here is a non-exhaustive list of unethical practices that are prohibited by the journal:

  • falsification or manipulation of data or result
  • fabrication of data or results
  • dishonesty in the analysis and interpretation of results
  • plagiarism, citation manipulation and duplicate publication

The authors of a paper must be ready to:

  • disclose any relationships that could lead to any conflict of interest, 
  • provide their data if the editorial board or reviewer ask for it
  • provide all ethics requirements of their study
  • cooperate with the editorial board during the publication process and after
  • notify the editors if they find a mistake in their paper during the publication process
  • ask for a retraction of their paper if subsequent to publication significant evidence comes to light which questions the integrity of the paper

Ethical responsibilities of reviewers

Any peer review manipulation is prohibited by the journal. The reviewers must follow these ethical practices:

  • accept a review only in their field of expertise and if they can meet the deadline
  • review in an impartial, unbiased and confidential way
  • inform the editors if they think they might encounter a conflict of interests
  • only use the paper they reviewed after its publication, with appropriate citation, and keep the paper confidential before its publication
  • review the manuscript in a professional, respectful way
  • not contact or attempt to contact the authors directly
  • notify the editor-in-chief if an author's name is revealed by accident or authors do get in contact because the reviewer was revealed to them

Do not hesitate to follow the guidance in the “Guidelines for reviewers” section. 

Ethical responsibilities of editors

The editors are composed of the editor-in-chief and the members of the editorial board. They are responsible for each paper published in their journal, they must make sure that these publications are of sufficient scientific quality and comply with the ethical standards and editorial  policies of the journal. An editor should:

  • be transparent and clear regarding the publication process
  • answer all questions and requests of clarification from the authors, reviewers and readers
  • ensure the good functioning of the journal, its frequent publication and its development
  • try to improve the procedures implemented by the journal, in all fields, and take into account any relevant suggestions or remarks given by someone in order to achieve this objective,
  • ensure academic integrity and ethical practices are upheld
  • be transparent over correction issues

The editors must:

  • take notice of the feedback received from readers, researchers and practitioners
  • provide explanatory and informative feedback and guidance
  • handle seriously any conflict or misconduct allegation
  • observe and prevent any conflict of interest
  • ensure anonymity of both authors and reviewers during the publication process
  • pre-review contributions that are within the scope of the journal, unless there are serious problems with the study
  • pre-review submissions following the ethical standards of independence and impartiality
  • arrange regular meetings with the editorial board for the development of publication policies and the journal
  • be open to the discussion of published papers and take seriously any convincing criticisms. Criticized authors have a right to reply, they must be contacted by the editors
  • make their decisions independently

If you suspect any ethical misconduct from authors or reviewers or editors, please, contact the editor-in-chief, an investigation will be launched in order to clarify the situation. The journal takes very seriously all ethical concerns or allegations. In the case of evidence of significant misconduct or other fraudulent action, the journal will retract a publication and publish a retraction notice detailing the circumstances.

Originality and plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as the use of words, ideas, models etc. without giving proper credit to their original creator or author through full citation of their work. Please notice that it includes plagiarism of your own works in the case that you do not cite one of your previous papers that you quote or reuse in your current paper. Plagiarism is academic dishonesty: the work you submit to a journal has to be yours. 

Your submission has to be a piece of original research, actively contributing to the existing literature. It must not be already published in another journal, nor submitted to another journal. Submissions to the journal may be checked for originality in plagiarism checker software. If the IJCCR finds plagiarism issues with a paper, it might not be published, and if it is an already published paper, it could be removed from our website with a retraction notice published, following an investigation from the editors. 

Here are some tips to help you avoid plagiarism:

  • always give the citation of words or ideas that are not your own
  • use quotes when using someone else’s words
  • do not superficially paraphrase a text, you should rephrase carefully what the author wrote with your own words according to your understanding of the text and after that cite them
  • cite yourself if you are using your previous papers
  • facts and common knowledge need not be cited, if you are unsure, include a citation
  • be all the more careful about plagiarism issues in the literature review part of a paper
  • you can self-check your text using plagiarism checker tools

Conflict of Interest Policy

The IJCCR guarantees the independence and the impartiality of the publication process of submissions by implementing the following conflict-of-interest principles:

Editors will not handle, nor have access to the reviewers’ names and reports about submissions from:

  • current colleagues at their institution
  • thesis advisors
  • Current co-authors
  • D students they advised in the past 2 years
  • graduate students at their current institution
  • a family member

Editors must disclose to the editor-in-chief any other relationships with the authors of a submission that they think could create a conflict of interest. The editor-in-chief will change the editor associated with the submission. If the editor-in-chief might be in conflict with the authors of a paper she or he was supposed to handle, she or he will ask another member of the editorial board to handle this paper, with appropriate confidential practices. 

Referees review papers in a blind fashion, so they are not supposed to be biased by any conflict of interest, since they do not know who the authors of the submission they review are. However, it might happen that the reviewer recognises a paper from one of her or his colleagues, (past) student, friends and so on (we know that the community who publishes in the IJCCR is linked with close relationships); in this case, the reviewer must disclose it to the editorial board, and she or he will be dismissed from the reviewing of the paper. The editor in charge of the paper will choose another reviewer.

Disclosure policy

The IJCCR does not systematically require that all authors of a submission provide a disclosure statement. However, in case you are involved in a relationship that could lead to a conflict of interest with respect to your submission, we highly encourage you to provide a personal Disclosure statement (one for each author or co-author who thinks she or he should provide one). This statement is important and it is in the best interest of the author because:

  • it helps us in choosing the most neutral reviewers possible for your submission;
  • it protects you from conflict of interest allegations that may occur in case a non-disclosed relationship is discovered;
  • it helps readers to better understand your standpoint at the time of the research. 

The statement should disclose:

  • any sources of financial support to fund the study. If there is none, that fact should be stated;
  • any interested party from whom you received a significant financial support (at least $10 000, in the past three years), or a significant in-kind support, such as access to a dataset for instance. An “interested party” is any individual, group or organization that has a financial, ideological, or political stake related to your submission.
  • any paid or unpaid positions as officer, director, or board member of relevant non-profit organizations or profit-making entities. A “relevant” organization is one whose policy positions, goals, or financial interests relate to the article.
  • if another party had the right to review the paper prior to its circulation

You only have to disclose relevant relationships, meaning that a disclosure statement is author-specific as well as paper-specific. It might happen that relationships that do not involve yourself directly, but involve one of your relatives or a close partner is relevant and thus should be disclosed.

In case you are not sure if a relationship should be disclosed, ask yourself this question: “Would I or one of my co-authors or my institution, be embarrassed if I had not disclosed this relationship and it was subsequently discovered by a journalist, colleague or university administrator?” If the answer to this question is “yes”, the relationship should be disclosed. If you are still not sure, we advise you to disclose the relationship, since you are more likely to regret not disclosing something than having disclosed it. Notice that your personal beliefs do not need to be disclosed. 

If your submission is published, your disclosure statement will be added in a footnote at the beginning of the paper.

Guidelines for reviewers

The IJCCR is very grateful to its reviewers, and we thank you for accepting to review submissions to the journal. When reviewing a submission, you will have to provide a publication recommendation and an assessment of the paper, to the authors and to the editors, based on six criteria: accuracy of the title and abstract in relation to the  contents of the paper, originality, conceptual development, research methodology, readability, and relevance to the journal audience. You will be given a form to fill in. Your review must be impartial, independent, confidential and ethical. We ask you to send us your report within 60 days. To help you to review the submission, you can apply the following guidance.

  1. The report does not need to be unnecessarily long, only focus on relevant criticisms and remarks. Most of the time, two or three pages are enough. 
  1. Be professional and benevolent in your review: although you have to be frank in your assessment, gratuitous or irrelevant criticisms should be avoided and may be edited out before they are shared with the authors. Unnecessarily harsh comments diminish us as a profession. 
  1. Here are some guidelines for the structure of the review that you may apply:
    1. Brief critical summary of the submission: clearly identify the contributions to the literature, this is important to eventually judge whether it is worth publishing it. Be specific about the strengths and weaknesses in the paper’s execution.
    2. Major concerns: highlight essential issues or concerns that absolutely need to be met by the authors to allow the paper to be published. If you are recommending acceptance, this section should be short, if you are recommending rejection, here is where you should justify it. Please, give specific attention to the assumptions, internal validity and external validity of the paper. 
    3. Minor suggestions: other suggestions that are not crucial but you think can really improve the paper’s quality. These remarks are left to the discretion of the authors. Please, be parsimonious, you should justify any extension or robustness check with at least a paragraph explaining why you would expect the results to change, the direction in which you believe they would change, and what this would mean for the paper at large if it did. 

We kindly ask you to not give your name or any way to recognise you in your report or filename, since the peer-review process is double-blind. In case despite the anonymisation of the manuscript you think you know who wrote the paper and that you might have a conflict of interest with them, please follow instructions as stated in the Conflict of interest section. Similarly, if you might be involved in a conflict of interest regarding  the topic of the paper you review, please notify the editors. Reviewers should bear in mind that all manuscripts contain confidential information, which should be treated as such.

For more guidance, you can read the following article: Berk, Jonathan B., Campbell R. Harvey, and David Hirshleifer. 2017. “How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31 (1): 231-44.