Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Marketing Science & Practice Journal follows the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing issued jointly by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME, and applies COPE guidance when handling suspected misconduct.

Responsibilities of authors

• Submitted work must be original, must not be under consideration elsewhere, and must not have been published previously in substantially the same form.
• All sources must be properly cited. Plagiarism in any form, including self-plagiarism and unattributed reuse of one's own earlier text, is unacceptable.
• Data must be genuine. Fabrication, falsification, and selective reporting of results are serious breaches.
• Authorship is limited to those who have made a substantive contribution to the conception, design, execution, analysis, or writing of the work. Everyone who meets this standard must be listed, and no one who does not. All listed authors must approve the final version.
• Any financial or personal relationship that could be seen to influence the work must be disclosed, as must all sources of funding.
• Research involving human participants must have been conducted in accordance with the ethical requirements of the country in which it took place, and, where applicable, approved by a competent ethics committee. Participants must have given informed consent, and their data must be handled confidentially.
• Authors must notify the Editor promptly if they discover a significant error in their published work, and cooperate in issuing a correction or retraction.

Responsibilities of editors

• Editorial decisions are based solely on the scholarly merit of the work and its fit with the journal's scope, without regard to the authors' nationality, institution, gender, seniority, or personal relationships.
• Editors treat all submitted material as confidential and do not disclose it to anyone other than the reviewers and the publisher.
• Editors do not use unpublished material from a submission in their own research.
• Editors recuse themselves from any manuscript in which they have a conflict of interest, and such manuscripts are handled by an independent editor.
• Editors act when an ethical concern is raised, whatever the age of the published article, and are prepared to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies where required.

Responsibilities of reviewers

• Reviewers who feel unqualified, or who cannot complete a review in reasonable time, should decline the invitation.
• Manuscripts under review are confidential and must not be shared or discussed with others.
• Reviews must be objective and supported by argument. Personal criticism of the author is not acceptable.
• Reviewers should identify relevant published work that the author has not cited, and alert the Editor to any substantial similarity with other work known to them.
• Reviewers must not use information obtained through review for personal advantage.

Misconduct, corrections, and retractions

Allegations of misconduct are investigated following COPE flowcharts, whether they concern a submitted manuscript or a published article. Authors are given an opportunity to respond. Where an article is found to contain a significant error, a correction notice is published and linked to the original. Where findings are unreliable, or where the work is the product of misconduct, the article is retracted. Retracted articles remain available with a clear retraction notice, so that the scholarly record remains complete.

Complaints and appeals

Authors who wish to appeal an editorial decision, or to raise a complaint about the conduct of the review process, should write to the editorial office with a clear statement of the grounds. Appeals are considered by the Editor-in-Chief, who may consult an independent editor or additional reviewers. The outcome of an appeal is final.

Artificial intelligence and automated tools

For authors. Authors must disclose any use of generative artificial intelligence in preparing a manuscript, beyond straightforward language correction, editing, and formatting. The disclosure should state which tool was used and for what purpose, and should appear in the methods or the acknowledgements. Authors are responsible for verifying the output of any automated tool they use, whether in the research itself or in preparing the manuscript. Automated tools cannot be credited as authors, since they cannot take responsibility for the work. Generative AI cannot be cited as a source.

For reviewers and editors. Reviewers and editors must not use generative AI to produce their assessments or editorial decisions. Uploading a manuscript to a generative AI service breaches the confidentiality of the review process, and such systems are prone to superficial feedback, bias, and fabricated references. Using such tools to edit or improve the language of a review that the reviewer has written is acceptable if disclosed to the Editor.

For the journal. Any routine use of automated tools by the journal is disclosed. The journal uses Turnitin for text similarity screening. Output from any automated tool, including similarity reports, is reviewed and interpreted by an editor before any action is taken. No editorial decision is made by an automated system.