Integrity is the backbone of science. As a scientific publisher, JEI therefore follows strong ethical guidelines. These ethical guidelines help us ensure the manuscripts we publish are accurate, truthful, ethically done, and gives credit where needed. We encourage you to thoroughly review our guidelines on Plagiarism, Academic Honesty, and AI use below. Not following these guidelines may result in your manuscript failing pre-review or being publicly withdrawn. Authors who seriously violate these academic honesty expectations may be banned from all future publishing opportunities with JEI and eiRxiv.
Make sure your work is entirely your own original creation and give credit when using someone else’s ideas, results, or images. Basically, if it’s not common knowledge or your own original idea, you need to cite it. JEI does not tolerate plagiarism, which is using another person’s work without crediting the source.
That said, we also understand that plagiarism can sometimes happen unintentionally – not because authors are intending to plagiarize, but because they simply don’t understand what does or doesn’t constitute plagiarism and don’t take enough steps to prevent it.
At eiRxiv and JEI, manuscripts that have not properly cited their sources will be sent back to the authors and–in severe cases–may be rejected, whether or not the plagiarism is intentional.
Please review our separate page on avoiding plagiarism for more information.
JEI also does not tolerate authors making up data or results, or falsifying any supporting documents (signatures, agreements, or permissions). Falsifying results seriously damages the trust and reputation of scientists as individuals and the scientific process as a whole and can have legal consequences for the authors. Maintaining scientific integrity is extremely important to be respected and valued within and beyond the scientific community.
You should also be honest about your hypothesis. Make your hypothesis before you start your experiments or analysis, and be honest about whether or not your results support your hypothesis. Do not change your hypothesis after you get your results. It’s ok to have an unsupported hypothesis, but it’s not ok to be dishonest about it.
While we understand why AI can be a helpful tool in some instances, our mission is to support students as they develop their own scientific writing skills and unique scientific voice. We believe first-hand experience with developing ideas, creating hypotheses, conducting research, and writing about it is the best way for students to develop as scientists and communicators.
In addition, AI tools sometimes pull text, images, and other information from other published, copyrighted, or private work without properly citing it, notifying the AI user, or getting permission from the original creator. It is also important to remember that AI and other similar tools (Large Language Models, Machine Learning, etc.) generate results based on predictions. Because of this, these models are known to “hallucinate,” or make up results that simply sound or look good even if they are incorrect.
As scientific publishers, we have an ethical responsibility to publish only research that is scientifically accurate and does not infringe on anyone else’s copyright. We therefore cannot ethically publish manuscripts that use AI in the following ways:
In short, your work must be your own original creation. You must read and summarize previous studies, make your hypothesis, perform the experiments, analyze and interpret data, draw conclusions, generate images, and cite resources yourself.
For additional information on manuscripts that use AI as the tool for conducting experiments, visit Topics We Accept.