Ethics Policy

Submission Declaration

Declaration of Interests
All authors are required to disclose any financial or personal relationships with other people or organisations that can influence their work. These include competing interests based on employment, stock ownership, personal relationships, paid testimonials, grants or other funding. Authors with no competing interests to declare should write, "I have no competing interests to declare". The disclosure must be written at the end of the manuscript before references.

Funding Sources
Authors are required to disclose all sources of financial support received for the conduct of the research and the preparation of the manuscript. This includes any grants, contracts, or other forms of financial support from any public, commercial, or not-for-profit organisations. If no funding was received, please include the following statement: "This research did not receive any specific funding”. This disclosure must also be included in the title page

Author Contribution
To ensure transparency and accurate attribution, all authors are required to specify their individual contributions to the research using the following categories:
   ● Research Design & Investigation: Conceptualised the research question and objectives;
      Designed the research approach and methods; Conducted the primary investigation and
      collected data;
   ● Data Management & Analysis: Collected, organised, and prepared data for analysis; Conducted
      statistical analysis or other types of data analysis; Created tables or figures to visualise the       
      data
   ● Project Management: Coordinated and managed the research project; Secured financial
      support: Coordinating with the team.
   ● Manuscript Preparation & Review: Drafted the initial manuscript; Reviewed and revised the
      manuscript.

Similarity and AI Index

To ensure originality and academic integrity, all submitted manuscripts will undergo a plagiarism check using a reputable similarity and AI detection software. The maximum acceptable similarity index for empirical articles is 5%-8% and around 10% for review articles. The maximum accepted percentage of AI content in the manuscript is 10%-15% with transparent reporting of usage at every stage (eg: use of softwares like nvivo for data analysis, use of grammarly for editing, use of chatgpt or nano banana - gemini for creating visualisations). Both the similarity index and the AI report will be checked by the journal's editorial team during the peer-review process. Manuscripts exceeding the similarity threshold or exhibiting significant AI-generated content may be rejected.
 

Ethics Statement
For empirical research, authors must include their Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval number on the title page of the manuscript. Other article types are exempt from this criteria.