Spectrum of Operational Research (SOR) is committed to transparency in scholarly publishing. Authors are expected to provide accurate and sufficiently complete information concerning the funding, competing interests, authorship, institutional affiliations, research ethics, data availability, and other matters that may be relevant to the assessment and interpretation of their work.
Transparency requirements apply throughout the submission, peer-review, revision, production, and publication process. Information provided to the journal must be accurate and must not intentionally omit or misrepresent material facts relevant to the manuscript or its evaluation.
SOR requires transparent disclosure of financial support related to the research and, where applicable, the publication of submitted work. Readers should be able to identify the organizations or other sources that supported the research and understand any relevant role those funders played in the study.
Authors must disclose all relevant sources of research funding, including grants, institutional support, commercial funding, governmental support, charitable funding, or other financial contributions. Grant numbers and the names of funding organizations should be provided where applicable.
Financial support specifically related to publication, including support for article processing charges or other publication costs, should also be disclosed where relevant and should be distinguished from funding provided for the research itself.
Where a funder or sponsor had a role in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of results, preparation of the manuscript, or the decision to submit the work for publication, this role must be clearly stated. Where the funder had no such role, authors may indicate this explicitly.
Funding information should normally be provided in a separate Funding statement in the manuscript. Non-financial assistance or other forms of support that do not constitute research funding may be acknowledged separately in the Acknowledgments section.
If the research received no external financial support, authors may state: "This research received no external funding."
Authors must disclose financial and non-financial interests that could reasonably be perceived as influencing the research, interpretation of the findings, or publication process.
Editors and reviewers are also required to disclose relevant competing interests and must not participate in the evaluation of manuscripts where an interest could compromise, or reasonably appear to compromise, their independence.
Detailed requirements are provided in the journal's Conflict of Interests policy.
The authorship of a manuscript must accurately represent the individuals who made substantive scholarly contributions to the work. Authors must not use guest, gift, honorary, ghost, purchased, or other inappropriate forms of authorship.
Where requested by the journal, authors should provide information describing their individual contributions to the research and manuscript.
Relevant authorship responsibilities and requirements are further addressed in the journal's applicable publication ethics and author policies.
Author affiliations must accurately identify the institutions with which the authors were appropriately affiliated in relation to the work being reported.
Affiliations must not be fabricated, manipulated, or presented in a misleading manner for the purpose of implying institutional support, increasing perceived credibility, influencing editorial assessment, or obtaining benefits for which the author or manuscript would not otherwise qualify.
Where applicable, authors must provide accurate information concerning ethical approval, informed consent, permissions, or other regulatory or institutional requirements relevant to the research.
Statements concerning ethical approval or consent must accurately reflect the procedures that were followed. False, fabricated, or misleading ethics declarations constitute a publication-integrity concern.
Authors should provide an appropriate data-availability statement where required or relevant to the nature of the research. The statement should accurately indicate whether supporting data are publicly available, available in a repository, available upon reasonable request, subject to legitimate access restrictions, or not applicable to the study.
Authors must not provide misleading information concerning the existence, availability, provenance, or accessibility of data, code, computational materials, or other supporting research records.
Authors must transparently disclose relevant previous dissemination of the submitted work, including closely related publications, preprints, conference papers, theses or dissertations, or other earlier versions where such information is relevant to evaluating originality or overlap.
Requirements concerning duplicate publication, redundant publication, extended conference papers, reuse of previously published material, and related matters are provided in the journal's Publication Integrity policy.
Where disclosure of Generative AI or AI-assisted technologies is required under the journal's policies, authors must provide accurate and transparent information concerning their use.
The applicable requirements, permitted uses, restrictions, and disclosure obligations are defined in the journal's Use of Generative AI and AI-Assisted Tools policy.
Authors should promptly inform the Editorial Office if they discover that material information provided during submission or included in a published article is inaccurate, incomplete, or requires clarification.
Where an error affects a published article, any formal amendment to the scholarly record will be considered in accordance with the journal's Retraction and Correction Policies .
Where inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading disclosure raises a substantive publication ethics concern, the matter may be assessed under the journal's Procedures for Dealing with Allegations of Unethical Behaviour .
