Publication ethical standards exist to ensure high-quality scientific publications, public trust in scientific findings, and that authors receive credit for their work and ideas.
All manuscripts are subject to peer review to meet standards of academic excellence. If manuscripts will be approved by the editor, submissions will be considered by peer reviewers, whose identities will remain anonymous to the authors.
Our Research Integrity team will occasionally seek advice outside standard peer review, for example, on submissions with serious ethical, security, biosecurity, or societal implications. We may consult experts and the academic editor before deciding on appropriate actions, including but not limited to recruiting reviewers with specific expertise, assessment by additional editors, and declining to further consider a submission.
The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the article's publication in the journal has been approved by all the other co-authors. All authors listed on a submitted article should have involved in the conception of the research idea or methodology design or acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data to the work reported. Submission to the Journal of Environmental studies [JES] is taken by the journal to mean that all the listed authors have agreed to all of the contents and the responsibility is shared by both author and co-author(s). It is also the authors’ responsibility to ensure that the articles are submitted with the approval of their institution. Any change to the authors list after submission, such as a change in the order of the authors or the deletion or addition of authors needs to be approved by a signed letter from every author. An acknowledgment from the editorial office officially confirms the date of receipt and the date of acceptance. Further correspondence and proofs will be sent to the corresponding author(s) until publication.
Authors must not use the words, figures, or ideas of other scientists without their permission. Copying even one sentence from someone else’s manuscript, or even one of your own that has previously been published, without proper citation is considered plagiarism. All sources must be cited at the point they are used, and reuse of wording must be limited and be attributed or quoted in the text.
Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized from a manuscript by other authors, whether published or unpublished, will be rejected and the authors may incur sanctions.
Journal of Environmental studies considers only original content, i.e. articles that have not been previously published. It is unethical to submit the same manuscript to more than one journal at the same time. Doing this wastes the time of editors and peer reviewers, and can damage the reputation of the authors and the journal.
Manuscripts submitted to JES must not be submitted elsewhere while under consideration and must be withdrawn before being submitted elsewhere. Authors whose articles are found to have been simultaneously submitted elsewhere may incur sanctions.
Redundant publication means publishing many very similar manuscripts based on the same experiment (also known as salami slicing), may result in rejection or a request to merge submitted manuscripts, and the correction of published articles.
If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they must cite the previous articles and indicate how their submitted manuscript differs from their previous work.
Duplicate publication of the same, or a very similar, article may result in the retraction of the later article and the authors may incur sanctions.
Authors whose submitted manuscripts are found to include citations whose primary purpose is to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, may incur sanctions.
Editors and reviewers must not ask authors to include references merely to increase citations to their own or an associate’s work, to the journal, or to another journal they are associated with.
Data fabrication means the researcher did not actually do the study, but faked the data. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment, but then changed some of the data.
The authors whose submitted manuscripts or published articles and found to have fabricated or falsified the results, including the manipulation of images, may incur sanctions, and published articles may be retracted.
All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians. Do not “gift” authorship to those who did not contribute to the paper. Anyone who contributed to the research or manuscript preparation, but is not an author, should be acknowledged with their permission. Changes in authorship must be declared to the journal and agreed to by all authors.
Submissions by anyone other than one of the authors will not be considered.
All authors in submitted manuscripts must be honest about any conflicts of interest which may exist when the results interpretation are influenced by whether sources of research funding, or any form of financial support directly or indirectly by means of supplying equipment or materials from other people or organizations. Statement must declare any potential conflicts of interest in the manuscript; if no conflict exists authors should declare that there is no conflict of interest. The articles may be rejected or retracted if potential conflict of interest is detected and not declared to the journal during submission.
If JES becomes aware of breaches of our publication ethics policies, the following sanctions may be applied:
Rejection of the manuscript
Rejection of any other manuscripts submitted by the author(s).
Not allowing submission for 1–3 years.
Prohibition from acting as an editor or reviewer.
JES may apply additional sanctions for severe ethical violations.
Suspected breaches of our publication ethics policies, either before or after publication, as well as concerns about research ethics, should be reported to our Research Integrity team. JES may ask the authors to provide the underlying data and images, consult editors, and contact institutions or employers to ask for an investigation or to raise concerns.