Ethics Policy

Ethics Policy and Best Publication Practices

Tabula Rasa adheres to the ethical guidelines for academic publications set out by Elsevier COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics).

Authors are encouraged to comply with the following:

• Carefully ensuring proper citation of third-party contributions in their articles, making appropriate use of direct quotations, paraphrases, or references, and clearly indicating the source.
• Limiting self-citations to a maximum of 5% throughout the manuscript and, whenever possible, to prioritize the use of primary sources.
• Citing transparently data from previous research. Similarly, we reject the practice of redundant publication. As academic publications rely on public funding, in the interest of financial and academic integrity, we consider this practice should be avoided.
• In the same line, we encourage our authors to disclose any conflict of interest related to their topics and—in the case of multi-authored articles—to clearly specify each author’s contribution to the submitted work, as well as each author’s explicit declaration of acceptance of responsibility for the product to be published.

Specifically, on our editorial team duties, authors and peer reviewers shall bear in mind the following:

Editorial Team

Authors

• As noted elsewhere, manuscripts submitted by authors shall be original and unpublished, not having been previously released in other journals, books, blogs, web pages or other publication media (in print or digitally), and shall not be undergoing simultaneous review processes by other journals or publishing houses.
• Authors shall attest that the content of their article is their own work and has not been written by other parties. Authors must be respectful of the moral and economic rights of other authors or entities. Therefore, they must explicitly state their authorship and respect for the intellectual and copyrights of other parties in a signed letter addressed to the journal.
• Authors shall fill out the authorship statement form that can be downloaded here, clarifying the contribution by any undersigned author in any manuscript submitted for review and potential publication in Tabula Rasa.
• Tabula Rasa discourages practices that involve false attribution to authors who were not directly involved in the research leading up to the article or in its writing. This includes gift authors (i.e., individuals who have not made a direct contribution in the writing or research process but appear as co-authors). It is also considered a bad practice for students or professors to include their thesis advisors or research group directors as co-authors simply on the grounds of their position of authority.
• Besides stating that the manuscript submitted to Tabula Rasa is original, has not been published previously, and is a product of their research work, the undersigning author(s), must state that no plagiarism was made and that generative artificial intelligence was not used in its writing, adding bibliographic references or generating data for the research.