Norms for research misconduct:

1) allegations regarding the authorship of contributions. According to the policy of our journal, all authors should be listed in the list of authors in the Cover letter form that is submitted with the manuscript. A person must be accountable for a specific aspect of the research, prepare the work, or make a unique addition to the idea, project, or research explanation to be deemed the author, and this responsibility must be acknowledged in the final work form. A small contribution might not be counted as authorship. Authors and co-authors may designate someone as a contributor and acknowledge them in the paper’s acknowledgement section even if their contribution is small, their data is appropriate or they provide some other kind of assistance. As per our policy, authors and co-authors of submitted papers must complete the Cover letter form to identify all contributors and affirm their approval for the paper’s publication.

2) duplicate submission/publication. This refers to the practice of submitting or publishing essentially the same study in two journals. These submissions and publications may happen at the same time or years apart.

3) redundant publication, commonly known as “salami publishing,” refers to the practice of submitting separate portions of one study to two or more journals. Or the results have already been disclosed elsewhere without the required citations, approval, or justification. The practice of “self-plagiarism” is regarded as a redundant publication. It involves reusing or appropriating ideas from earlier works without properly our attributing them. This frequent behaviour could be inadvertent. The information required to evaluate an author’s usage of previously published material is typically provided by the author’s disclosure of such use.

4) citation manipulation. Citation manipulation refers to the following types of behaviour:

• excessive citation of an author’s research by the author (i.e., self-citation by authors) as a means solely of increasing the number of citations of the author’s work;
• excessive citation of articles from the journal in which the author is publishing a research article as a means solely of increasing the number of citations of the journal; or
• excessive citation of the work of another author or journal, sometimes referred to as ‘honorary’ citations (e.g., the editor-in-chief of the journal to which one is submitting a manuscript or a well-known scholar in the field of the researcher).

5) data fabrication is the use of knowingly implausible data in the research process, the deliberate discovery of research results, the use of unreliable information in the process of data collection or data processing. In addition, a form of data fabrication is the use in the list of literary sources of references to non-existent publications or distortion of the bibliographic description.

6) falsification is the manipulation of research data, violations in the process of setting parameters of equipment settings used in the process of conducting research in order to obtain the desired result of the experiment, biased correction of data in the process of their processing, setting of individual data in the process of the experiment, etc.

Academic plagiarism applies to all types of sources, including texts, drawings, fragments, mathematical expressions and transformations, program codes, etc. Sources of academic plagiarism can be published and unpublished books, articles, theses, manuscripts, etc.

The following main varieties of academic plagiarism are distinguished:

• verbatim borrowing of text fragments without designating them as quotations with reference to the source; in some cases, even the use of one word without reference to the source is considered incorrect, if this word is used in the unique meaning provided by this source;
• using facts, ideas, formulas of numerical values, etc. from a certain source without reference to it;
• paraphrasing the text of the source in a form close to the original text, or summarizing ideas, interpretations or conclusions from a certain source without reference to this source;
• submitting as own works dissertations, monographs, textbooks, articles, theses, reports, control, calculation, course, diploma and master’s theses, abstracts, etc., made to order by other persons, including works in respect of which the real authors have given consent to such use.

Other types of research violations

In addition to plagiarism, there are a number of cases in which the action is recognized as research misconduct:

• reprinting significant portions of his early publications, including translations, without proper acknowledgment or citation of the original;
• concealment (silencing) of research results;
• enabling sponsors to compromise the independence of the research process or the reporting of results in such a way as to formulate or disseminate a biased view of the research;
• unjustified expansion of the research bibliography;
• maliciously accusing the researcher of committing a misdemeanor (crime) or other violations;
• distortion of scientific achievements;
• exaggeration of the importance and practical significance of the results;
• delaying or unnecessarily complicating the work of other researchers (sabotage);
• abuse of official position to encourage violation of research integrity;
• ignoring alleged violations of research integrity by other persons, or covering up a misdemeanor (crime) or other violations by institutions;
• creating or supporting journals that neglect research quality control (“predatory journals”).

Procedure for handling allegations of research misconduct

If ethical violations are detected in the process of submission, review or publication of the manuscript, the editorial board applies the following procedure:

• Informing all authors and/or reviewers about discovered facts of research violations, non-compliance with publication ethics and misconduct.
• Publication of an official notice with a detailed description of misconduct on the journal’s website.
• Termination of consideration and review of the manuscript (if it has not yet been published) or retraction of the article (if the facts of unethical behavior are discovered already after its publication).
• If the discovered facts of ethical violations on the part of the authors are significant, the editorial board reserves the right to inform about it the organizations where the authors work, the institutions that funded the research, or other research bodies.

In case of violation of the Research misconduct policy the following sanctions may be imposed:

1. Immediate rejection of the manuscript and other subsequent manuscripts submitted by the author(s) to any journal co-founded by Sumy State University.
2. Prohibition on submission of manuscripts for consideration within 1–2 years.
3. Prohibition on holding the position of editor and performing reviewer duties of any journal co-founded by Sumy State University.