Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

The Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia (JCEA) is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows the COPE Core Practices and flowcharts in handling every matter described on this page. The journal also follows the CONSORT and TOP (Transparency and Openness Promotion) guidelines and the ACOMS editorial standards.

Editorial responsibility for these policies rests with the Editor-in-Chief. Questions and reports may be sent to j.c.eastern.asia@gmail.com.

Authorship and contributorship

JCEA applies authorship criteria consistent with the ICMJE recommendations. Authorship is limited to those who have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the work. Each named author must satisfy all four of the following:

substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of the data;
drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
final approval of the version submitted for publication; and
agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including the accuracy and integrity of any part of it.

Contributors who do not meet all four criteria — for example those who provided funding, general supervision, data collection alone, or language assistance — should be named in the acknowledgements rather than listed as authors. Guest, gift and ghost authorship are not permitted.

The corresponding author submits on behalf of all co-authors and warrants that every author has seen and approved the submission. Any change to the author list after submission — addition, removal, or change of order — requires a signed request from all authors, including the author being added or removed, stating the reason for the change. Requests must reach the editorial office before publication; after publication a change to the author list is handled as a correction (see below).

Authors are encouraged to include a contributorship statement describing each author's role, and to supply ORCID identifiers.

Complaints and appeals

Appeals against editorial decisions. An author who believes a decision was based on a material misunderstanding of the manuscript, or on a review that was factually incorrect, may appeal once. Appeals are sent to j.c.eastern.asia@gmail.com with the subject line “Appeal” and must set out the specific points at issue and the author's response to each. Disagreement with a reviewer's judgement of significance or fit is not in itself grounds for appeal.

Appeals are considered by the Editor-in-Chief, or, where the Editor-in-Chief handled the original decision or has any conflicting interest, by a Managing Editor who was not involved. The editorial office aims to acknowledge an appeal within one week and to communicate an outcome within eight weeks. The decision on an appeal is final. Manuscripts under appeal should not be submitted elsewhere until the appeal has concluded.

Complaints about the journal. Complaints about editorial process, conduct of staff, editors or reviewers, or about the handling of an ethical matter should be sent to the same address and will be answered by the Editor-in-Chief. Complaints are logged, investigated, and answered in writing. If the complainant is not satisfied with the outcome, the complaint may be escalated to the publishers — the Cyber Emotions Research Center at Yeungnam University and WATEF — and, where it concerns adherence to publication ethics, to COPE.

Allegations of research misconduct

JCEA takes seriously any allegation of misconduct in a submitted or published article, including plagiarism, self-plagiarism and redundant publication, data fabrication or falsification, image manipulation, citation manipulation, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and breaches of research-ethics requirements.

Allegations may be made by anyone, are treated confidentially, and are assessed on the evidence rather than on the identity or motive of the person raising them. The journal follows the relevant COPE flowchart in every case. In outline:

The editorial office acknowledges the allegation and gathers the documentary evidence.
The corresponding author is informed of the specific concern and invited to respond, normally within four weeks, on behalf of all authors.
Where the response does not resolve the concern, the journal contacts the authors' institution or research-integrity office, which is the appropriate body to conduct a formal investigation. JCEA does not itself adjudicate findings of misconduct.
Consideration of the manuscript is suspended, or an expression of concern is published for an article already in the literature, while an investigation is under way.

Depending on the outcome, the journal may reject the manuscript, require correction, publish a correction or retraction, notify the authors' institution and funder, and decline to consider further submissions from the authors concerned. Neither this policy nor any editorial statement of the journal should be read as encouraging or tolerating misconduct of any kind.

Conflicts of interest

Authors must disclose all financial and non-financial interests that a reasonable reader might consider relevant — funding and grants, employment and consultancies, honoraria, patents and holdings, and personal, political or institutional relationships bearing on the subject of the article. Disclosure is made in the manuscript in a “Conflicts of interest” statement and in the cover letter. Where there are no such interests, the manuscript should state that none exist. Funding sources are named in a funding statement; declaring a funder does not entitle the funder to any influence over the content or the decision.

Reviewers must decline an invitation, or declare the interest and let the editor decide, where they are employed at the same institution as any author, have supervised or been supervised by an author within the past three years, have co-authored or actively collaborated with an author within the past five years, have a close personal relationship with an author, or have any financial interest in the outcome. Every review submitted to JCEA carries a conflict-of-interest declaration.

Editors take no part in decisions on manuscripts they have authored or co-authored, that come from their own institution or from close collaborators, or in which they have any competing interest. Such manuscripts are reassigned to an editor with no connection to the work, and the handling editor's identity is not disclosed to the conflicted editor. Submissions from the Editor-in-Chief are handled in full by a Managing Editor.

Data sharing and reproducibility

JCEA follows the TOP guidelines and encourages open research practice. Authors are encouraged to deposit the data, code and materials underlying their findings in a trusted public repository, and to cite the deposit with a persistent identifier in a “Data availability” statement in the manuscript. Where data cannot be shared — because of participant confidentiality, third-party licensing, or legal restriction — the statement should say so and explain the conditions under which the data may be obtained.

Data sharing is encouraged but not, at present, a condition of publication. Authors are expected to retain their primary data for at least five years after publication and to make it available to the editors on reasonable request where a question about the findings arises.

Ethical oversight

Research involving human participants — including surveys, interviews, experiments and the collection or analysis of identifiable social-media data — must have been conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and with the requirements of the authors' institutions. Manuscripts reporting such research must state the name of the approving research-ethics committee or institutional review board and the approval reference, or, where formal approval was not required, explain why. Manuscripts must state that informed consent was obtained from participants, and that consent to publish was obtained where individuals could be identified.

Authors working with vulnerable populations, sensitive political material, or data obtained from online platforms are expected to describe the steps taken to protect participants from harm and to safeguard anonymity. Editors may request evidence of ethical approval at any stage and may decline a manuscript on ethical grounds regardless of its scholarly quality.

Intellectual property and research integrity

Manuscripts must be original, must not have been published previously, and must not be under consideration elsewhere. Prior appearance as a conference abstract, a thesis chapter, or a preprint does not preclude submission, but must be disclosed in the cover letter with a link to the earlier version. Publication of substantially the same work in more than one journal (redundant or duplicate publication), and the division of a single study into multiple minimally distinct articles, are not acceptable.

All submissions are screened for textual overlap. Authors are required to supply an originality report from an international plagiarism-detection service with their submission, and the journal screens suspected cases with iThenticate. Plagiarism of text, data, images or ideas, in any proportion and from any source including the authors' own earlier work, is a ground for rejection or retraction.

Citation manipulation — adding citations whose primary purpose is to increase the citation count of an author, a colleague or this journal — is not permitted. Reviewers and editors must not require authors to cite their own work or work published in JCEA as a condition of acceptance. Falsification or fabrication of data, and the manipulation of images beyond adjustments that leave the original information intact, are treated as misconduct.

Authors must hold the rights to all material they submit and must obtain and evidence written permission for the reproduction of copyrighted figures, tables, extended quotations or datasets. Copyright in JCEA articles remains with the authors; see Copyright and Licence.

Post-publication discussion

Scholarly debate about work published in JCEA is welcome. Readers who wish to comment on, question or dispute a published article may write to j.c.eastern.asia@gmail.com. Substantive commentaries are sent to the authors of the original article for response and, where the editors judge that the exchange advances the field, both the commentary and the response may be published in a subsequent issue, subject to editorial review. Comments raising an integrity concern are handled under the misconduct policy above rather than as scholarly debate.

The journal does not host an on-site comment facility. Published articles carry a DOI so that post-publication discussion elsewhere can cite them unambiguously.

Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern

The version of record is permanent. JCEA does not remove published articles from the record; errors are addressed by publishing a linked notice, following the COPE retraction guidelines.

Correction (erratum / corrigendum). Where an error affects the record but not the reliability of the findings — an incorrect figure, a mislabelled table, a missing funding disclosure, an author-list error — a correction notice is published in the next issue. The notice states what was wrong and what is correct, is linked from the original article, and is itself citable.
Retraction. Where the findings are unreliable, whether through honest error or misconduct; where the work has been published elsewhere; where material has been plagiarised; or where the research was carried out without required ethical approval, the article is retracted. The article remains online, is clearly marked as retracted on the landing page and in the full text, and retains its original DOI. The retraction notice names the reason, states who is retracting the article, and is linked from the original.
Expression of concern. Where a serious concern has been raised that cannot yet be resolved — for example while an institutional investigation is under way, or where an investigation has not been conducted fairly — the editors may publish an expression of concern, linked from the article, and update or replace it once the matter is resolved.

Retraction and correction notices are free to read, are indexed, and are sent to the databases and indexing services that carry the journal. Requests for a correction or retraction may be made by the authors or by any reader, and are assessed by the Editor-in-Chief.

Use of generative AI

Authors. Generative AI tools cannot be listed as an author: authorship carries accountability that only a person can hold. Authors who have used generative AI in the preparation of a manuscript — for drafting, translating, editing, coding, analysing or generating figures — must disclose the tool, the version, and how it was used, in the methods section or the acknowledgements. Language polishing by an AI tool should be disclosed but does not require description in the methods. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality and integrity of everything they submit, including any citation or quotation produced by such a tool.

Reviewers and editors. Manuscripts under review are confidential. Reviewers and editors must not upload a manuscript, or any part of one, to a generative AI service that does not guarantee confidentiality, and must not delegate their judgement to such a tool. A review must be the reviewer's own assessment.

The journal. JCEA publishes optional AI-generated companion material — plain-language summaries, audio summaries and visualisations — only where the authors have given explicit opt-in consent and an editor has approved the output. Companion material is labelled as AI-generated wherever it appears, and the peer-reviewed article remains the authoritative version of the work.