Ethics Policy

Scholar Journal follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for all aspects of editorial decision-making. We are committed to ensuring that advertising, reprint, or other commercial revenue has no impact on editorial decisions.

All editors, authors, and reviewers are expected to uphold the highest standards of ethical conduct. Any suspected breach of these standards is investigated promptly and transparently.

All listed authors must meet the ICMJE criteria for authorship: (1) substantial contribution to conception, design, data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation; (2) drafting or critically revising the work for important intellectual content; (3) final approval of the version to be published; and (4) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Individuals who contributed to the work but do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section, not listed as authors.

Guest, gift, or ghost authorship is a breach of publication ethics. If suspected, the manuscript will be investigated in accordance with COPE guidelines.

All manuscripts are screened for text similarity before peer review. Submissions with substantial unattributed overlap with previously published material (typically >15% similarity) will be rejected without review.

Duplicate publication — submitting work published elsewhere in substantially similar form — is prohibited. Simultaneous submission to multiple journals is also prohibited. Authors found to have done so may be banned from future submissions.

Self-plagiarism, including verbatim reuse of your own previously published Methods sections without citation, is treated as plagiarism.

All authors must declare any financial or personal relationships that could be perceived as influencing the research or its interpretation. This includes employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications, and grants.

Editors are recused from handling any manuscript in which they have a conflict — including manuscripts from their own institution, close collaborators, or papers that concern their direct competitors.

Reviewers must disclose conflicts to the handling editor before beginning a review and are expected to decline invitations if a genuine conflict exists.

Research involving human participants must have received approval from an appropriately constituted ethics committee and must have been conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Authors must include a statement confirming this in the Methods section.

Informed consent must be documented. If participants are identifiable from case reports or photographs, explicit written consent must be obtained and the manuscript must state this.

Animal research must comply with the ARRIVE 2.0 guidelines and all applicable national regulations. Authors must state the ethics committee approval in the Methods section.

Fabricating or falsifying research data — including manipulating images beyond what is scientifically justifiable — is scientific misconduct and will result in immediate rejection, retraction of any published articles, and notification to the authors' institutions.

Raw data must be available on request during the review process and for a minimum of 5 years post-publication.

Errors in published articles that do not affect the conclusions are corrected by publishing a Correction notice linked to the original article.

Articles containing errors that invalidate conclusions, or that involved research misconduct, are retracted. A retraction notice is published in its place and the original article is clearly marked as retracted.

All corrections and retractions are publicly accessible and permanently linked to the affected article.

To report suspected research or publication misconduct, email our ethics team at ethics@publinexa.com with as much detail as possible. All reports are treated confidentially.

We follow COPE's flowcharts for handling allegations of misconduct and will acknowledge receipt within 5 business days.