Spectrum of Operational Research (SOR) is committed to protecting the integrity, reliability, originality, and transparency of the scholarly record. Authors are responsible for providing accurate, complete, and truthful information throughout the submission, peer-review, revision, production, and publication process.
Fabrication, falsification, inappropriate manipulation, duplicate or redundant publication, material misrepresentation, citation manipulation, and other practices that compromise the reliability or integrity of scholarly work are not acceptable.
General procedures for reporting and assessing suspected research or publication misconduct are provided in the journal's Procedures for Dealing with Allegations of Unethical Behaviour .
Authors must not fabricate, falsify, manipulate, or intentionally misrepresent data, results, analyses, images, figures, computational outputs, references, research methods, authorship information, ethical approvals, funding information, affiliations, data-availability information, or other material aspects of the research.
Fabrication includes making up data, observations, experiments, results, participants, sources, references, or other research information and presenting them as genuine.
Falsification includes manipulating research materials, processes, data, images, computational procedures, analyses, or results, or selectively altering or omitting information in a manner that materially misrepresents the research or its findings.
Authors must also not provide knowingly false or materially misleading information during submission, peer review, revision, production, or communication with the journal.
Honest errors, legitimate methodological disagreements, and differences in scholarly interpretation are not, by themselves, considered fabrication or falsification. Authors who identify a significant error in their work should promptly inform the Editorial Office.
Data, analyses, mathematical models, algorithms, simulations, optimization procedures, computational experiments, statistical analyses, and other research outputs must accurately represent the work that was actually conducted.
Authors must not selectively alter, omit, manufacture, or present results in a manner intended to create a misleading interpretation of the research.
Where data have been cleaned, transformed, excluded, imputed, simulated, reconstructed, or otherwise processed, relevant procedures should be described where they are material to the interpretation, evaluation, or reproducibility of the study.
Where reasonably necessary to assess a credible integrity concern, SOR may request relevant data, source files, computational outputs, code, analysis records, documentation, or other supporting materials, subject to applicable legal, ethical, confidentiality, privacy, and intellectual-property restrictions.
Manuscripts submitted to SOR must represent original scholarly work and must not be simultaneously under consideration for publication by another journal or publisher.
Authors must disclose closely related manuscripts or publications where they are relevant to evaluating potential overlap with the submitted work.
Duplicate or redundant publication occurs when substantially the same research, data, analysis, results, or conclusions are submitted or published more than once without adequate disclosure, justification, and appropriate cross-referencing.
Legitimate prior dissemination through recognized preprint servers, theses or dissertations, conference presentations or proceedings, institutional repositories, working papers, or similar scholarly channels does not automatically prevent consideration by SOR. Relevant prior versions must, however, be transparently disclosed and appropriately cited where applicable.
Where inappropriate duplicate or redundant publication is identified before publication, the manuscript may be rejected. Where such concerns affect an article that has already been published, any formal action affecting the scholarly record will be taken in accordance with the journal's Retraction and Correction Policies .
SOR may consider substantially extended and further developed versions of papers previously presented at conferences or published in conference proceedings.
The existence of the earlier conference version must be disclosed during submission, and the previous work must be appropriately cited in the manuscript. Authors should clearly explain the relationship between the submitted manuscript and the earlier version.
The submitted article must provide a substantial and identifiable scholarly contribution beyond the conference version. Such development may include, but is not limited to:
SOR does not apply a fixed percentage of new text, data, or material when determining whether an earlier conference paper has been sufficiently extended. The assessment is based on the significance, originality, and scholarly value of the additional contribution.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that reuse of material from an earlier conference publication complies with applicable copyright and licensing requirements. Detailed requirements concerning permissions and reuse are provided in the journal's Copyright and Licensing policy.
Authors must appropriately acknowledge and cite their own previously published work where it is relevant to the submitted manuscript. Previously published work must not be presented as a new or original contribution without appropriate disclosure.
Substantial reuse of previously published text, figures, tables, images, datasets, or other material must be transparent and must comply with applicable copyright and licensing requirements.
Detailed requirements concerning third-party material, permissions, attribution, adaptation, and reuse are provided in the journal's Copyright and Licensing policy and are not repeated here.
Textual overlap and unattributed reuse may also be assessed in accordance with the journal's Plagiarism Policy .
SOR does not tolerate practices whose primary purpose is to manipulate citation counts, journal metrics, author-level indicators, institutional indicators, or other citation-based measures.
Authors must not include irrelevant, unnecessary, or inappropriate references for the purpose of artificially increasing citations to their own publications, the publications of particular researchers, specific institutions, SOR, or any other journal.
Editors and reviewers must not pressure or require authors to cite their own publications, the work of colleagues or associates, articles published in SOR, or publications from any other source unless the recommended references are genuinely relevant and reasonably necessary to improve the scholarly quality, accuracy, context, or completeness of the manuscript.
Citation recommendations made during peer review or editorial assessment must be based on scholarly relevance. Authors may question citation requests that they reasonably believe are irrelevant, excessive, coercive, or intended primarily to influence citation indicators.
Suspected citation manipulation will be assessed under the journal's Procedures for Dealing with Allegations of Unethical Behaviour .
Concerns involving fabrication, falsification, inappropriate manipulation, duplicate or redundant publication, inappropriate reuse, citation manipulation, or other potential breaches of publication integrity will be assessed under the journal's applicable publication ethics policies.
The detailed procedures concerning initial assessment, confidentiality, opportunity to respond, institutional referral, and possible editorial measures are provided in the journal's Procedures for Dealing with Allegations of Unethical Behaviour and are not duplicated on this page.
Where an established integrity concern affects an article that has already been published, any correction, expression of concern, retraction, removal, or other formal action affecting the scholarly record will be governed by the journal's Retraction and Correction Policies .
Publication-integrity matters should be considered together with the following journal policies where applicable:
In assessing concerns relating to publication integrity, SOR will consider relevant guidance and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) .
Each case will be considered according to its individual circumstances, the evidence available, and the journal's applicable publication ethics policies and procedures.
