Allegation of Research Misconduct

JIEET takes every allegation of research misconduct seriously and handles it confidentially, fairly, and in line with the COPE guidelines and flowcharts. The journal acts on allegations about manuscripts under review as well as published articles.

What counts as research misconduct

  • Fabrication: making up data or results and reporting them.
  • Falsification: manipulating research materials, equipment, processes, images, or data so that the research is not accurately represented.
  • Plagiarism: using another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without credit (see Plagiarism Policy).
  • Other serious breaches, such as duplicate submission, authorship manipulation (gift, ghost, or guest authorship), citation manipulation, undisclosed conflicts of interest, manipulation of peer review, and lack of ethical approval or informed consent for research involving human participants.

How to report

Anyone (reader, reviewer, editor, or author) can report a concern by e-mail to the Editor-in-Chief at [jieet e-mail]. The report should identify the article or manuscript and describe the concern with supporting evidence. The identity of the person reporting is kept confidential.

Handling procedure

  1. Acknowledgment: the Editor-in-Chief acknowledges receipt within 7 days.
  2. Preliminary assessment: the editor checks whether the allegation is specific and supported by evidence, consulting editorial board members or independent experts if needed.
  3. Author response: the corresponding author is informed of the concern and asked to respond with an explanation and, where relevant, raw data, within 14 days.
  4. Decision: if the explanation is satisfactory, the case is closed. If not, or if the authors do not respond, the journal contacts the authors' institution(s) and asks them to investigate.
  5. Outcome: depending on the findings, the journal may reject the manuscript, publish a correction or expression of concern, retract the article, and/or bar the authors from submitting for a defined period.

All decisions and correspondence are documented. Throughout the process, authors are treated as innocent until misconduct is established.