Ethical Guidelines

Authors should uphold the highest ethical standards in the production of their scholarly works. Some important guidelines are offered below. For a more detailed discussion of ethical guidelines, see the Linguistic Society of America’s Ethics Statement.

Reporting standards and data retention

Articles should be objective, and data should be presented accurately. Papers should contain enough detail to allow others to replicate the work. Authors should retain raw data for a period of ten years after publication and may be asked to provide raw data during the editorial review.

Originality, acknowledgment, and plagiarism

Submitted works should be entirely original; if others’ work and/or words have been used, they should be appropriately cited and, if appropriate, permission for the citation should be obtained from the source. Plagiarism occurs in many forms (e.g., submitting another’s entire paper as one’s own, copying or paraphrasing sentences from another paper without attribution, appropriating results of research conducted by others); all forms are completely unacceptable.

Redundant or concurrent publication

Authors should not submit the same or a very similar manuscript to more than one journal concurrently. In general, authors should not submit previously-published papers for publication in another journal.

Authorship

All those who have made significant contributions to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the study should be listed as co-authors. Those who have made lesser contributions to the paper should be acknowledged. The corresponding author should ensure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper.

Working with human subjects

If the work involves the use of human subjects, the author should ensure to check the boxes in the submission checklist stating that the researchers:

• respected the rights and wishes of their human subjects;
• did everything in their power to ensure that their research posed no threat to the well-being of the research participants;

If the author's institution has an ethics assessment committee, the researcher must also check the box stating that this committee has approved the research.

Conflicts of interest

All authors should disclose any financial or other conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their study.

Significant errors in published works

If the author discovers or is informed by a third party of a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her article, the author must promptly notify the journal editor and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper.