Ethics Code

Behaviours

Razón y Fe has a firm commitment to the advancement of interdisciplinary knowledge, so its main objective is to constantly improve, considering the point of view of the authors, evaluators and the editorial board and establishing processes that ensure the quality of the content and safeguard academic integrity.

The composition of the editorial board is a reflection of the Razón y Fe community. The board is an important part of the journal's functioning, the director periodically informs its members of the important developments that occur in the journal, how it evolves and agrees with them on the objectives for the journal.

Razón y Fe review  adheres to the code of conduct of the Society of Jesus and will act in accordance with it.

Director and editors

The director or, where appropriate, the designated editor will always ensure the quality of the publication, being the one who makes the final decision on what is published in the journal, for which he will take into account the needs of the journal and its objectives.

They will rely on the community (councils, authors, evaluators and readers), for which they make the necessary tools and guides available to them and will facilitate communication channels to receive improvements, complaints or the declaration of any conflict of interest by all the actors involved in each process.

Authors

The journal makes available to authors publicly, before submission, the mandatory rules for publishing an article. Authors, by sending the original to the journal, accept these rules.

Authors who publish an article in Razón y Fe retain the economic rights of their work, granting the journal the necessary permissions to publish and market it in the paper version under  a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

Authors can, and are encouraged by the journal's management, to publish the editor's version (VoR) on the internet, institutional pages, repositories and scientific social networks or any other means that they believe can help the dissemination of their research, duly citing the journal.

Although due to its field of specialization it may be unusual in the case of Razón y Fe, when an article collects 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 yield a certain result. If the director or evaluators have suspicions at the time of the evaluation, the authors may be required to present such raw material or, if detected later, request them after publication, so that such data must be kept for a reasonable period of time.

Reviewers

The journal will value 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 contributors as much as possible, trying to consolidate a staff that reflects the journal's community. And it is committed to selecting the best reviewers available to evaluate each article, avoiding sending new reviews to those who have made disrespectful criticisms or do not behave ethically.

All the reviewers involved in the peer review process will be external to the editorial board and to the Universidad Pontificia Comillas, publisher of the journal. If the reviewers detect any conflict of interest, because they know the author or authors of the article to be evaluated, they will immediately inform the person in charge of the editorial process, who will look for new reviewers.

The assigned director or 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 available and the necessary channels for adequate communication. It will also ensure that they preserve the confidentiality of the material provided to them and facilitate the communication of any conflicts of interest before starting the assessment.

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, always being open to new lines of research, including those that challenge the results of previous research that have already been published in the journal itself.

By submitting the manuscript, the author(s) are responsible for ensuring that their manuscript is a completely original text and does not include research already published without duly citing its source.

They also agree not to submit the manuscript to multiple journals at once. If this is exceptionally the case, the author will duly justify this exception in the field provided for this purpose in the submission form.

Authorship 

The author who makes the submission is responsible for including all those people who have had a substantial role in the investigation and guarantees that no irregularities have been incurred such as the transfer of signatures.

The journal does not impose any limit on the number of authors, as long as this number is justified by the complexity of the study. The journal will not accept subsequent modifications or add new authors.

Sources

The author(s) undertake to properly cite all sources used in their research.

Likewise, the references included in the article will only be the sources consulted in the research and the author or authors certify with their submission that they have not incurred in bad practices such as the manipulation of citations.

The journal undertakes not to condition in any way, either by way of requirement or by way of suggestion, the publication of originals to the inclusion of citations of articles from the journal itself in the articles sent by the authors, even if there are articles that, due to their content, could be relevant to the subject matter,  scrupulously respecting the list of references that the authors declare to have consulted. The evaluators may logically indicate gaps in the citations or recommend extensions of the citation according to their independent scientific criteria.

Sanctions

In the event of plagiarism or redundant content, the author(s) will assume full responsibility for the consequences derived from it (economic, legal or of any other nature).

Malpractice

To avoid malpractice, the journal will use anti-plagiarism software (iThenticate) that reviews several sources of digital content and prepares a report with percentages of similarity between the manuscript and the sources consulted.

Following established standards and considering that the tolerated percentage of similarity is not a fixed value, the journal will not accept more than 30% similarity with other texts by the author of the article (self-plagiarism and redundant content) and more than 15% when it comes to texts by other authors that are not properly cited (plagiarism).

Those articles in which any bad practice related to the falsification of sources or manipulation of citations is detected will also be rejected, the journal will be very strict in this regard. In the event of gaps in the identification of sources, the editorial process will be suspended until the error is corrected, and the director or assigned editor reserves the right to reject the text on the grounds of lack of scientific rigor.

The journal is attentive to the evolution of the use of different generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems as a support for the preparation of research papers and original essays. Pending a greater consensus in the community and in scientific publications, the journal states that it expects any author who has used some type 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 source management:  data search and analysis, proofreading, text translations, etc. The journal considers the assistance of generative AI to be legitimate, especially in more mechanical and non-creative tasks, such as data collection, generation of statistics or graphs. However, it rejects those works whose originality, substantial contribution or conclusions are, in short, the direct result of generative AI and not of human ingenuity. It will use the available tools, as they come out, to detect the use of generative AI and its relative weight in the preparation of articles.

In the same way, those articles in which irregularities in authorship are detected will be rejected.

Article Removal

Articles in which malpractice is detected after publication will be withdrawn, and the journal reserves the right to record it.

In the event that the director has evidence of plagiarism, prior publication of results, copyright infringement, undeclared conflict of interest of any of the actors involved in the process, manipulation of data or citations or any irregularity in authorship, the article will be withdrawn.

A corrigendum may be published in the event that it is necessary to correct an error or omission, but only if the substantial content of the article is not affected by said error.

For the preparation of this code, the recommendations of the Committee on Publications Ethics.