Ethics code
Behaviour
Estudios Eclesiásticos has a strong commitment to the advancement of theology and canon law, so its main objective is to constantly improve, taking into account the views of authors, reviewers and the editorial board and establishing processes designed to ensure the quality of content and safeguard academic integrity.
The composition of the editorial board is a reflection of Estudios Eclesiásticos community. The editorial board is an important element in the functioning of the journal. The director regularly informs its members of major developments in the journal, how it is evolving and agrees with them on the goals to be pursued by the journal.
Estudios Eclesiásticos adheres to the code of conduct of the Society of Jesus and will act in accordance with it.
- Director and editors
The director or, when appropriate, the acting editor shall at all times ensure the quality of the journal and shall make the final decision on what is published in the journal, taking into account the overall needs of the journal and its objectives.
It will rely on the community (boards, authors, reviewers and readers) and will provide them with the necessary tools and guidelines and will facilitate communication channels to receive improvements, complaints or the declaration of any conflict of interest by all stakeholders involved in each process.
- Authors
Before an article is sent, the journal makes publicly available to the authors the mandatory rules for publishing an article. By sending the original article to the journal, authors accept these rules.
Authors who publish an article in Estudios Eclesiásticos retain the copyright to their work, granting the journal the necessary permission to publish and market it in the paper version under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.
Authors may, and the journal management encourages them to, publish the version of record on the internet, institutional pages, repositories and scientific social networks or any other medium that they believe can help disseminate their research, duly citing the journal.
Although, due to its field of specialisation, it may be unusual in the case of Estudios Eclesiásticos, when an article includes complementary information from the research or any other material on which it is based, the author or authors certify that they are data that have been generated in the research itself and that they have not been manipulated in any way to produce a particular result. If the editor or reviewers are suspicious at the time of assessment, the authors may be asked to submit such raw material or, if detected at a later date, they may be asked to submit it after publication, and such data should therefore be retained for a reasonable period of time.
- Reviewers
The journal will assess the work of the reviewers who collaborate with the publication, making public the list of those who have collaborated during the year. It will try to expand the list of collaborators as much as possible, in order to consolidate a pool that reflects the journal's community. The journal undertakes to select the best reviewers available to evaluate each article, avoiding sending new reviews to those contributors who have made disrespectful criticisms or do not behave ethically.
All reviewers involved in the peer review process will be external to the editorial board, the scientific advisory board, and Universidad Pontificia Comillas. If reviewers identify any conflicts of interest, such as knowing the author(s) of the article under evaluation, they will promptly notify the individual responsible for the editorial process. Subsequently, new reviewers will be sought to ensure impartiality.
The director or assigned editor will guide the reviewers on what is expected of them, especially with regard to the originality of the articles and plagiarism or redundant content (if detected), making available to them the tools at their disposal and the necessary channels for proper communication. The director or assigned editor will also ensure that they preserve the confidentiality of the material provided to them and will facilitate the communication of any conflict of interest prior to the start of the evaluation.
- Originality of the text
The selection of published articles will be based solely on the importance, originality and clarity of the research and its relevance to the scope of the journal, and will always be open to new lines of research, including those that challenge previous research results already published in the journal itself.
By submitting a manuscript, the author(s) accept(s) responsibility for ensuring that the manuscript is a completely original text and that it does not reflect research that has already been published without proper citation of the source.
They also undertake not to send the manuscript to several journals at the same time. In exceptional cases, the author must duly justify this exception in the field provided for this purpose in the submission form.
- Authors of the publication
The submitting author is responsible for including all those persons who have played a substantial role in the research and guarantees that no irregularities such as the assignment of signatures have occurred. Due to the scope of its specialisation, the journal limits the maximum number of authors to three.
- Sources
The author(s) undertake(s) to properly cite all sources used in their research.
Likewise, the references included in the article must be only the sources consulted in the research and the author(s) certify with their submission that they have not engaged in malpractice such as the manipulation of citations.
The journal shall not in any way, either through demands or suggestions, condition the publication of original articles to the inclusion of citations of articles from the journal itself in the articles submitted by the authors, even in the case of articles whose content could be relevant to the subject matter, scrupulously respecting the list of references that the authors declare to have consulted. The reviewers may, of course, indicate gaps in the citations or recommend additions to them according to their independent scientific criteria.
Sanctions
In the event of plagiarism or redundant content, the author(s) assume full responsibility for any consequences (financial, legal or of any other nature).
- Malpractice
To prevent malpractice, the journal will use anti-plagiarism software (iThenticate) that reviews various sources of digital content and produces a report with percentages of similarity between the manuscript and the sources consulted.
Following established standards and taking into account that the percentage of similarity tolerated is not a fixed value, the journal will not accept more than 30% of similarity with other texts by the author of the article (self-plagiarism and redundant content) or more than 15% in the case of texts by other authors that are not duly cited (plagiarism).
If plagiarism is detected prior to publication, the article will be automatically rejected, and if it is detected afterwards, the journal reserves the right to note this and will withdraw the article from publication.
Articles in which any malpractice related to misrepresentation of sources or manipulation of citations is detected will also be rejected. The journal will be very strict in this regard. In the case of gaps in the identification of sources, the editorial process will be suspended until the deficit is corrected, with the editor or the assigned editor reserving the right to reject the text on the grounds of lack of scientific rigour.
The journal is aware of the evolution of the use of different generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems as support for the production of original research papers and essays. While awaiting a greater consensus in the community and in scientific publications, the journal expects any author who has made use of any kind of generative AI support in the preparation of their article to give due account of it, considering it either as part of the methodology or as a handling of sources: data gathering and analysis, correction of writing, translations of texts, etc. The journal considers the assistance of generative AI to be legitimate, especially in more mechanical and non-creative work, such as data collection, generation of statistics or graphs. However, it rejects papers whose originality, substantive contribution or conclusions are ultimately the direct result of generative AI rather than human intelligence. It will use the available tools, as they become available, to detect the use of generative AI and its relative weight in the preparation of articles.
Likewise, articles in which irregularities in authorship are detected will be rejected.
- Retraction
Articles found to have malpractice after publication will be retracted, and the journal retains the right to note this.
If the editor discovers evidence of plagiarism, the findings have been previously published elsewhere, undisclosed conflict of interest among the stakeholders, manipulated data or citations, or any irregularities in authorship, the article will be retracted.
If it is necessary to correct any error or omission detected in the article, a corrigendum may be published, provided that it does not affect the substantive content of the article.
The recommendations of the Committee on Publications Ethics have been taken into account in the drafting of this code.
