1. What the journal treats as misconduct
| Category | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Fabrication and falsification | Inventing or altering data, interview material, transcripts, field notes, survey responses, questionnaires, photographs or results; reporting respondents who were never interviewed, or fieldwork that did not take place; selectively altering cases or quotations so that they support a claim. |
| Plagiarism and text reuse | Appropriating another person’s words, data, instruments, coding frames, research design or argument without attribution, including self-plagiarism, undisclosed translation and undisclosed reuse. Classified and handled under the Plagiarism Policy. |
| Duplicate and redundant publication | Publishing the same study, or a substantially overlapping dataset and analysis, more than once; simultaneous submission to another journal; dividing one dataset into several thin articles. |
| Authorship violations | Gift, guest and ghost authorship; omitting a qualifying contributor; adding or removing authors without the agreement of all. See Authorship. |
| Undisclosed competing interests | Concealing a financial or non-financial interest that a reader would want to know about, including commissioned research and dual roles in the setting studied. See Conflict of Interest. |
| Citation manipulation | Citations added without scholarly justification to inflate counts, and coercive citation by a reviewer or editor. |
| Peer-review manipulation | Fabricated reviewer identities or contact details, reviews written by the authors or their associates, and any attempt to influence the choice of reviewer improperly. |
| Breaches of research ethics | Absent, falsified or misrepresented ethics approval; research conducted without informed consent where it was required; breaches of the confidentiality or anonymity promised to participants; publishing identifying details of respondents or communities without consent; research that exposed participants to avoidable harm. See the duties set out in Publication Ethics. |
| Brokered or purchased manuscripts | Manuscripts produced or sold by a third party, indicated by data that cannot be produced, authors unable to describe their own fieldwork, unexplained changes of authorship, or non-institutional contact details. |
2. Who may raise a concern, and how
Anyone may raise a concern — a reader, a reviewer, an editor, a research participant, an institution, or an author about their own work. Send it to indonesiajournalsocialsciences@gmail.com with the article title and DOI, the specific passages, figures or claims concerned, and whatever evidence supports it. A concern is examined however long after publication it is raised, and whether or not the person raising it gives their name. An anonymous concern is assessed on its evidence; anonymity is not a reason to take no action.
3. How a concern is handled
- Acknowledgement. The editorial office acknowledges receipt and records the concern in the submission or article file.
- Preliminary assessment. An editor with no interest in the matter assesses whether the evidence raises a credible question. Where it does not, the person raising it is told so, with reasons.
- Investigation. The editor follows the applicable COPE flowchart. The journal may request the underlying data, transcripts, questionnaires, consent forms or ethics documentation; ask the corresponding author for a written explanation on behalf of all authors; consult an independent specialist; and re-run similarity screening.
- Right of reply. The authors are told what is alleged and given a reasonable period to respond before any finding is recorded, and their response is considered on its merits.
- Institutional referral. Where the evidence suggests serious misconduct, the journal contacts the authors’ institution, which is the body competent to investigate its own researchers. The journal does not conduct an employment investigation, and does not pronounce on matters that belong to the institution.
- Decision and record. The editor records the finding, the reasons and the action taken. The outcome is communicated in writing to the authors and, so far as confidentiality allows, to the person who raised the concern.
Where confidentiality owed to research participants limits what the authors may supply, they are asked to demonstrate the existence and provenance of the material in a way their ethics approval permits. Inability to produce raw data is assessed in that light, not treated automatically as evidence of fabrication.
4. Protections during an investigation
- The matter is kept confidential while it is examined. Details are shared only with those who need them to assess it.
- The person raising the concern is not identified to the authors without their consent.
- No finding is recorded, and no public notice is issued, until the authors have had the opportunity to respond.
- A concern about an editor, a board member or the publisher is handled by an editor who is not the subject of it and who has no interest in the outcome; where necessary the publisher appoints an independent assessor.
- Raising a concern in good faith does not prejudice the complainant’s own dealings with the journal, whether as author or reviewer.
5. Possible outcomes
The response is proportionate to the evidence and to the stage reached. An honest error is corrected; deliberate misconduct is not treated as an error. Depending on the finding, the journal may:
- take no further action, and say so;
- require revision, additional disclosure or additional documentation before a manuscript proceeds;
- decline the manuscript;
- publish a correction, an expression of concern while an institutional investigation is unresolved, or a retraction — the mechanisms, and what each notice contains, are set out in Corrections and Retractions;
- notify the authors’ institution, the funder, and where appropriate the ethics committee;
- decline future submissions from the responsible parties for a stated period;
- remove a reviewer from the panel, or a member from the editorial board.
6. Appeals
An author who considers a finding wrong may appeal in writing to the Editor-in-Chief within 30 days, setting out the grounds. The appeal is referred to an editor who was not involved in the original decision. Where the appeal concerns the Editor-in-Chief, it is referred to the publisher, who appoints an independent assessor. A complainant who remains unsatisfied after the journal’s process is exhausted may approach COPE.
7. Records
The concern, the evidence, the authors’ response, the finding and the action taken are retained in the article file and preserved with the journal’s editorial records. They are available, under Editor credentials, to accreditation assessors and to any properly constituted investigation.
8. Standards followed
This policy follows the COPE Core Practices and the COPE flowcharts for suspected misconduct, and the requirements of Indonesian national journal accreditation. It is reviewed at least once a year.
Read together with Publication Ethics, Plagiarism Policy, Authorship, Conflict of Interest, Corrections and Retractions and Post-publication Discussion.