Publication Ethics
Publication Ethics Statement
The ethical policy of the Sawa Journal of Medical Research is based on the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and is consistent with the Code of Conduct issued by the Sawa Journal of Medical Research Editorial Board. Readers, authors, reviewers, and editors must follow these ethical policies when engaging with Sawa Journal of Medical Research. The journal's ethical policy determines which research papers or sample research articles submitted to the journal can be published in the journal. For information on this publication and ethical guidelines, please visit https://publicationethics.org/
Publishers' Duties and Responsibilities
1. The journal is committed to ensure that the decisions made by the editorial board regarding scientific research are final.
2. The journal promises to ensure that decisions regarding research submission are made solely based on professional judgment and are not influenced by any commercial interests.
3. The journal is committed to maintain the integrity of academic and research records.
4. The journal monitors ethics by the editor-in-chief, associate editors, editorial board members, reviewers, authors, and readers.
5. The journal continually checks for plagiarism and fraudulent data in submitted research.
6. The journal is always prepared to publish corrections, clarifications, and retractions of its publications when needed.
Editors' Duties and Responsibilities
1. Journal editors must have full authority to accept or reject a manuscript.
2. Journal editors must maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts under review until they are published.
3. The editor-in-chief must make the decision regarding whether to publish or reject the submitted manuscript, along with the editorial board members and reviewers.
4. Journal editors must maintain the confidentiality of reviewers.
5. Journal editors must disclose and avoid any conflicts of interest.
6. Journal editors must maintain academic integrity and strive to meet the needs of readers and authors.
7. Journal editors must be willing to investigate plagiarism and fraudulent statements and be prepared to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when necessary.
8. Journal editors must limit their content to intellectual content only.
9. Journal editors must not disclose any information about the submitted manuscript to anyone other than the responsible author, potential reviewers, other editorial advisors, and the publisher.
10. Unpublished material disclosed in the submitted manuscript must not be used by the editor or editorial board members for their own research purposes without the author's express written consent.
Reviewer Duties and Responsibilities
1. Reviewers must assist the journal's editorial board in making the decision to publish submitted research.
2. Reviewers must maintain the confidentiality of research submitted to them for evaluation.
3. Reviewers must provide timely comments to assist the editorial board in deciding whether to publish submitted research or not.
4. Reviewers must treat research submitted for review as confidential and must not use the information obtained through review for personal gain.
5. Reviewer comments for each research must be technically, professionally, and objectively supported.
6. Reviewers should not review research in which they identify a conflict of interest with any of the authors, companies, or institutions.
7. Reviewers must disclose any conflict of interest and endeavor to avoid it.
Authors' Duties and Responsibilities
1. The manuscript must be submitted in English and must be written according to proper grammar and appropriate terminology.
2. The manuscript must be submitted as unpublished elsewhere and is not currently under review by another journal or publisher.
3. The author is responsible for ensuring that the manuscript is approved for publication by all other authors.
4. In order to maintain the evaluation system, authors are obligated to participate in the peer review process to evaluate manuscripts submitted by others.
5. Authors are also responsible for ensuring that manuscripts from a particular institution are submitted with the necessary approval from that institution.
6. It is a condition of submission that authors allow the manuscript to be edited in a legible format.
7. Authors are required to clearly identify who provided financial support for the research and/or preparation of the manuscript and briefly describe the role of the institution/sponsor in any part of the work.
8. If research was written by more than one researcher, the responsible author must sign a consent form from all authors before the research is accepted for publication, thus ensuring that the author is legally responsible for the journal's ethics and privacy policy.
9. Under an open access license, authors retain copyright ownership of their content, and anyone is permitted to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are properly credited.
10. All authors agree to allow the responsible author to work as a correspondent with the editorial office to review the research editing and proofing process.
11. When the author(s) discovers an error or inaccuracy in their published work, it is the author's duty to immediately notify the journal's editor-in-chief or publishers to withdraw or correct the research.
12. All authors should be aware that research submitted for review or published in the journal is subject to anti-plagiarism screening. Plagiarism is a serious violation of publishing ethics.
13- All authors must ensure that all authors have read the final submission checklist before submitting the manuscript to Sawa Journal of Medical Research.
Transparency Principles
1- Double Review Mechanism: Research in Sawa Journal of Medical Research undergoes confidential, double-blind peer review, meaning that the researcher is unaware of the reviewer, and neither the reviewers nor the researcher is aware of the reviewer.
2- Editorial Board: Sawa Journal of Medical Research has a very strong editorial board, whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas covered by the journal.
3- Research Publication Fees: The journal is a fully open access journal, and the full text of published research is freely accessible to all through the journal's website. In addition, authors are required to pay a research publication fee of 100,000 Iraqi dinars for accepted research.
4- Copyright: The journal has clarified the type of copyright under which authors' work will be published.
5- Identification and Handling of Allegations of Research Misconduct: The Editor-in-Chief takes reasonable steps to identify and prevent publication of papers in which research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and falsification/fabrication of data, among others.
6- Website: The journal's website contains comprehensive information about the journal to ensure high ethical and professional standards.
7- Journal Name: The journal's name, Sawa Journal of Medical Research (SJMS), is unique and cannot be easily confused with another journal.
8- Conflict of Interest: Authors are required to indicate whether or not there are any impending conflicts when submitting their manuscripts to Sawa Journal of Medical Research through the Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form.
9- Publication Schedule: The version in which the journal is published is clearly indicated.
10- Archiving: The journal's plan for electronic backup and maintaining access to the journal's content is clearly indicated.
Violation of Publication Ethics
1- Plagiarism: The intentional use of someone else's ideas or other original material as if they were their own, even if a sentence has been used by the same researcher and published in other journals without proper citation, is considered plagiarism by Sawa Journal of Medical Research. All research under review or published in Sawa Journal of Medical Research is subject to screen using plagiarism prevention software. Therefore, plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics.
2- Data Fabrication and Falsification: Data fabrication and falsification mean that the researcher did not actually conduct the study, but rather fabricated data or results and recorded or fabricated information. Data falsification means that the researcher conducted the experiment but manipulated, altered, or omitted data or results from the research findings.
3- Simultaneous Submission: Simultaneous submission occurs when a paper (or large sections of a paper) is submitted to one journal while it is already under consideration by another journal.
4- Duplicate Publication: Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full reference, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions.
5- Redundant Publications: Duplicate publications include the inappropriate division of a study's results into multiple articles, often as a result of a desire to inflate academic résumés.
6- Inappropriate Author Contribution or Attribution: All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research and agreed to all of its requirements. Do not forget to include anyone who has made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.
7- Citation Manipulation: Citation manipulation includes excessive citations, in the submitted research, that do not contribute to the scientific content of the article and are included solely for the purpose of increasing citations to a particular author's work, or in articles published specifically for the journal. This distorts the significance of the work and the specific journal in which it appears and is therefore a form of scientific misconduct.
8- Sanctions: In the event of documented violations of any of the above policies in any journal, regardless of whether the violations occurred in a journal or not, the following sanctions will be applied: (1) immediate rejection of the violating paper, (2) immediate rejection of every other paper submitted to any journal published by any of the authors of the violating paper, (3) a ban of not less than 36 months on all authors from any new submissions to any journal, either individually or jointly with other authors of the violating papers, and (4) prohibition of all authors from serving on the editorial board of any journal.
Handling Misconduct
Once the journal determines a violation of the journal's publishing ethics, Sawa Journal of Medical Research diligently addresses ethical concerns following standard practice specific to the particular issue, as outlined below.
1. The journal editor's first action is to notify the Sawa Journal of Medical Research's editorial board by providing copies of the relevant material and a draft letter to the corresponding author requesting clarification in a non-judgmental manner.
2. If the author's explanation is unacceptable and it appears that serious unethical behavior has occurred, the matter is referred to the Publication Committee via the editorial board. After deliberation, the committee will decide whether the case is serious enough to warrant a ban on future submissions.
3. If the violation is less severe, the editor, with the advice of the Publication Committee, will send a letter of reprimand to the author and remind the author of the Sawa Journal of Medical Research's publishing policies. If the paper is published, the editor may request the author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record.
4. The notification will be sent to the responsible author, and any work submitted by the author responsible for the violation will be rejected by the journal.
5. Authors are prohibited from serving on the editorial board of Sawa Journal of Medical Research or as reviewers of the journal. The journal reserves the right to take further action.
6. In extreme cases, notifications will be sent to the authors' affiliated institutions, and authors will be prohibited from submitting their work to the journal for five years.
7. In cases of serious fraud that result in the retraction of a paper, a notice of retraction will be published in the journal and linked to the article in the online version. The online version will also be marked "Retracted" with the date of retraction.
Allegations of Misconduct
Sawa Journal of Medical Research is highly sensitive to research misconduct and uses all available means to prevent the publication of erroneous research. Although there is no standard definition of research misconduct, the journal's Board of Editors broadly defines research misconduct into three categories of actions and behaviors.
Sawa Journal of Medical Research uses this definition of misconduct in its handling of this issue and strictly follows the Scientific Publication Ethics Follow-up Plan for dealing with research misconduct, as follows:
1- Mistreatment of research subjects
2- Falsification and fabrication of data
3- Piracy and plagiarism
Human Rights Protection
Sawa Journal of Medical Research does not publish manuscripts that do not include a copyright statement. Typically, the journal requires a statement indicating that the research has been reviewed by an Institutional Review Board, either in the Materials and Methods section or in the Acknowledgments section.
Falsification and Data Fabrication
Fabrication is defined as the appropriation of data from other research without collecting scientific data. Falsification is defined as the manipulation of research materials to achieve a favorable conclusion. Fabrication and falsification can occur at any stage of research (in the field) up to publication, where misuse of citations can occur (referring to citations when they do not support the argument). The Sawa Journal of Medical Research attempts to identify any type of fabrication or falsification at all levels of research processing, from initial screening to comprehensive evaluation of revised research and even after publication. Reporting any fabrication or falsification is an ethical obligation for our authors, co-authors, reviewers, editors, and readers. In any case of falsification or fabrication, the journal reserves the right to withdraw the fabricated or falsified material. The journal strictly follows the guidelines of the Publication Ethics Committee in dealing with fabrication and falsification.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined as the appropriation of someone else's ideas, findings, or words. Another category of plagiarism is self-plagiarism, when an author publishes their own ideas, data, and text in different journals when there is no need for such duplication.
Duplicate or redundant publication, or "self-plagiarism," occurs when a work or substantial parts of a work are published more than once by the author(s) of the work without proper attribution or justification for the overlap. This can be in the same or different languages. We do not support significant overlap between publications unless there is an editorial agreement that this enhances academic discourse; the author has obtained approval from the original publication; and an acknowledgment and citation of the original source are included in the article.
Sawa Journal of Medical Research utilizes all means to detect plagiarism. For quality assurance, manuscripts with more than 20% plagiarism in the manuscript will be returned to the author to eliminate similarities and reduce the likelihood of plagiarism. The journal strictly follows the guidelines of the Publication Ethics Committee in dealing with plagiarized articles.