Ethical Guidelines

General Principles

The Educational Point journal upholds the Committee on Publication Ethics's (COPE) ethical guidelines and publication standards. To comply with relevant laws, policies, and the Declaration of Helsinki, authors must include additional documents such as informed consent and ethics committee approval when submitting their work. This is mandatory for studies that involve human or animal subjects, particularly vulnerable populations, or hazardous substances. To ensure transparency, authors must disclose potential conflicts of interest and collaborate fully with editors, responding promptly to their inquiries.

The authors can be contacted for data, code, or other study-related materials. Only those who have made substantial contributions and endorse and accept full responsibility for the results, discussions, and conclusions should be listed as authors. Other contributors should be acknowledged. To avoid ghostwriting or gift authorship, the email addresses of all authors, as well as the ORCID of the corresponding author, must be included. Additionally, for increased transparency, every author must provide details of their contributions, institutional email addresses, ORCIDs, Scopus author IDs, and WoS researcher IDs. Rarely, authors may be added, deleted, or reassigned in revisions with justification and approval from all co-authors, pending editorial approval.

Once an article has been accepted for publication, the author list cannot be changed. Proper citation and acknowledgment should be given when utilizing others’ work, words, ideas, or results in the study. Authors must obtain permission from the copyright holders if their study includes copyrighted photographs, tables, or text. The authors are assumed to have received all necessary permissions before submitting their work. Please note that the editors and publisher cannot be held liable if it is found that the required approvals were not obtained.

Reviewers: Editors appreciate and respect reviewers’ opinions when making editorial decisions. Reviewers should promptly notify editors if they do not feel qualified to provide a review or if there is a potential conflict of interest. Once a review is accepted, reviewers must maintain the utmost confidentiality of the research materials and submit their constructive feedback by the designated deadline.

Editor: Editors have several responsibilities, such as guiding expert reviewers, overseeing the double-blind editorial peer review process, maintaining submission confidentiality, addressing any suspected unethical behavior, and making publication decisions based on the quality, relevance, originality, and significance of the proposal, rather than the authors’ ethnicity, gender, or religion. Additionally, editors monitor adherence to globally accepted ethical standards in published articles. Editors must be unbiased when editing submitted manuscripts.

Educational Point's publisher oversees its publication and provides the needed infrastructure and online tools to ensure the continuous release of the journals. This involves ensuring that the content is accessible and distributed. The publisher promotes adherence to COPE standards, emphasizing fairness, confidentiality, objectivity, honesty, respect, and timeliness for authors, editors, and reviewers. Respecting editorial processes and decisions is essential.

Academic dishonesty and plagiarism constitute academic misconduct.

At Educational Point, editors take academic integrity very seriously. Our editorial office and editors strictly forbid any form of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism, self-plagiarism, duplicate publication, simultaneous submission, data falsification, forgery, citation manipulation, copyright infringement, ghostwriting, and gift authorship. We use iThenticate software to ensure originality and compare submitted manuscripts with millions of published articles and web pages. Editors also check for plagiarism in each revision. If misconduct is suspected, the publisher and editor work together to resolve the case using appropriate COPE flowcharts and take appropriate action, even if it is discovered years after publication.

Corrections And Withdrawals

In the event of errors or inaccuracies found after publication, it is necessary to issue an erratum or a corrigendum. However, if the mistakes are severe and affect the foundation of the study, or if there is proof of academic misconduct, the COPE retraction guidelines require the article to be retracted.

Grievances And Appeals

If you are unhappy with the publication process or the content, you can email editor@educationalpoint.net with a thorough explanation. We will follow COPE’s Policy on Complaints and Appeals on all complaints. 

Other Concerns

Any problems with the peer-review process in the journal will be addressed under the appropriate COPE guidelines and flowcharts. If you have further questions or worries, please contact us at editor@educationalpoint.net.