ETHICAL POLICY

School of Business and Economics (SBE) journals are members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and operate according to the University of Management and Technology (UMT) codes of ethics/conduct for Journal Editors.

Editors and Referees

Our editors and referees are required to declare any conflicts of interest related to articles they are requested to evaluate. To ensure a double-blind peer review, the identities of authors are not disclosed to referees, and vice versa. Papers submitted by the editor/associate editor or by any member of the editorial board are handled by another editor, and the concerned person will not be able to use the manuscript submission and tracking system to identify the referees.

Authors

Authors are expected to adopt high ethical standards in their research and writing, ensuring that:

The submitted work or any of its essential content has not been previously published in a refereed journal and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. To ensure this, we will check submissions using the anti-plagiarism software. As per the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan, similarity must be less than 19% in Turnitin.

• Published relevant material/work by the authors and others must be properly cited in APA.
• Sources of funding and significant help must be acknowledged in the acknowledgment section and no objection certificate must be provided if funding is used.
• Consents are obtained from parties with vested interests in the submitted work.
• Their primary results should be retained for at least five years and can be made available if there is any reason for them to be checked.

If a published paper or its essential content is found to have been published before or if any other wrong-doing is verified, the journal will take one or more of the following actions:

• Publishing a notice
• Retracting the paper
• Preventing the corresponding author from publishing in SBE Journals
• Reporting the impropriety to the corresponding author’s, co-authors, employer, head of the department (HOD) and funding body.

Complaints

We publish corrections only when significant errors arise from author error (Corrigenda) or editorial mistakes (Errata). If there is a serious complaint about the journal’s own procedures, the Editor-in-Chief will confer with the corresponding author and any relevant members of the editorial board in order to resolve the problem. The advisory board of SBE Journals will be consulted if further guidance is required, and if the above procedures prove unacceptable, the matter will be referred for outside adjudication by COPE.