International Journal of Servant-Leadership
Publication Ethics Statement
IJSL is committed to upholding the highest standards of quality, integrity, and transparency. All reasonable steps will be taken to avoid publishing papers marred by plagiarism, citation manipulation, falsified data, "sloppy science", or other forms of unprofessional or unethical research.
IJSL's practices are informed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidance for scholarly publishing.
Authors are required to confirm that their submissions have not been previously published and that all necessary permissions have been secured. Authors and reviewers must declare any interests that could compromise or appear to compromise the validity of a publication.
Author Guidelines
When a submission is uploaded to our system, the author list should be final and correct. Author lists with the incorrect information can mislead readers and cause confusion about who is responsible and accountable for the published work.
All authors listed must have given prior approval to have their name attributed to the file(s) being submitted and agree to publication. The corresponding author must ensure that all authors qualify for and have agreed to authorship. They are responsible for informing all co-authors of relevant editorial information throughout the review process.
The ICMJE recommends the following criteria for authorship. Authors must have:
- made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work
- contributed to the drafting the work, or revising it critically for important intellectual content
- provided final approval of the version to be published
- agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved
- agreed to be named on the author list, and approved of the full author list
Contributors who meet some but not all of these criteria can be acknowledged in the publication but should not appear on the author list.
Acknowledgements should include sources of funding, supervision of research groups, administrative support, language editing and proofreading. The corresponding author should obtain permission from those being acknowledged, as sometimes being named might constitute an endorsement of the publication.
The addition or removal of authors during the editorial process will only be permitted once a clear and justifiable explanation for why the edit is required has been provided to the editorial team and publisher. Attempts to introduce 'ghost' or 'gift' authorship will be treated as cases of misconduct and reported to the relevant institution.
Please ensure that the above guide is followed during the submission process.
Competing Interests
We are committed to transparent and bias-free research. To ensure that all publications are as open as possible all authors, reviewers and editors are required to declare any interests that could appear to compromise, conflict or influence the validity of the publication. This process is designed to reinforce the readers' trust in the research data.
Please declare any competing interests that you have. A conflict of interest must be declared if there is any reason why the information or the interpretation of information being produced may be influenced by a personal or financial relationship with other organisations or individuals, or if these relationships could be reasonably perceived from other people as having influencing objective data or decision-making. Everyone involved in the submission, editorial processing, peer review and publication should declare any competing interests that they may have as early as possible.
Any author or reviewer that is linked to the journal must declare what this relationship is within the competing interests statement, including all members of the editorial team/editorial board. For example, the Editor-in-Chief, Editorial Board members etc should clearly display their position in the journal.
Competing interests can take the form of both financial and non-financial relationships. The declaration of such relationships helps to ensure that academic rigour is maintained and that publications cannot be accused of undue bias or misinformation.
Examples of competing interests:
- authorship including one of the editorial team/board
- receipt of payment, in any form, from an organisation or individual related to the subject matter
- ownership of stocks or shares in organisations directly related to the subject matter
- receipt of grants or funding
- membership of relevant boards
- related patents/applied for patents
- gifts
- known relationships that will hinder impartiality (e.g. colleagues, family, mentor, previous supervisor/student)
- political, religious, ideological interests
- commercial
Competing interests should generally be declared to cover at least the previous 5 years - e.g., if a reviewer supervised the author's PhD then (and if they feel comfortable reviewing the work) their professional relationship should have ended over 5 years ago. This is a minimum requirement, and individuals must declare if they have had a previous relationship with someone/an organisation relevant to the submission that could be deemed to influence decision making.
For authors:
Please place the competing interests section at the end of the manuscript, immediately before the reference list. The authors' initials should be used to denote differing competing interests. For example:
- "TW completed paid consultancy work from [company name] as part of the data acquisition for this study. BH has minority shares in [company name], which part funded the research grant for this project. SM is a member of the editorial board for [journal name], which is on a voluntary basis. All other authors have no competing interests."
If there are no competing interests, please add the below statement:
- "'The author has no competing interests to declare" for papers with a single author or "The authors have no competing interests to declare" when multiple authors are contributing.
For reviewers
If you have any competing interests, please list them in the text box available on your reviewer page. For example:
- "I was previously employed by the laboratory that collected this data."
If you do not have competing interests, please add the below statement:
- I have no competing interests to declare."