Publication Ethics

The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL is committed to maintaining high standards of academic integrity, transparency, scholarly quality, and ethical publishing. The journal expects authors, editors, reviewers, and all individuals involved in the publication process to conduct their responsibilities honestly, objectively, fairly, and professionally.

The ethical policies of The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL are guided by internationally recognized principles of responsible scholarly publishing and good editorial practice, including relevant guidance provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Responsibilities of Authors

Authors must ensure that manuscripts submitted to The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL represent original scholarly work and provide an accurate and honest account of the research undertaken. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of the data, analysis, interpretations, citations, and conclusions presented in their manuscripts.

Authors must not fabricate, falsify, manipulate, selectively omit, or misrepresent research data, evidence, sources, results, or findings. Any deliberate attempt to distort the scholarly record may be treated as research misconduct.

Originality and Plagiarism

All submitted manuscripts must be original. Authors must appropriately acknowledge the ideas, wording, data, figures, tables, methods, and other intellectual contributions of previous researchers. Material taken from another source must be properly quoted, paraphrased, and cited in accordance with the journal's reference style.

Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable. This includes direct plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, inappropriate paraphrasing, unattributed translation, duplication of previously published material, and substantial reuse of an author's own previously published work without appropriate citation or disclosure.

The editorial office may use plagiarism-detection or similarity-checking software at any stage of the editorial process. A similarity report is considered an editorial screening tool rather than an automatic determination of misconduct. Each case will be assessed in context by the editorial team.

Duplicate and Redundant Publication

Authors must not submit the same manuscript simultaneously to more than one journal. A manuscript submitted to The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL must not be under consideration elsewhere at the time of submission.

Authors must disclose if substantial portions of the work have previously appeared in another publication, conference proceeding, working paper, thesis, dissertation, repository, preprint, or other publicly accessible form. Legitimate secondary publication or reuse may be considered only when it is transparent, appropriately referenced, legally permitted, and academically justified.

Authorship and Contributorship

Authorship should be limited to individuals who have made substantial intellectual contributions to the conception, design, execution, analysis, interpretation, or preparation of the work. All listed authors should have participated sufficiently in the research to take responsibility for their contributions.

All authors must approve the final version of the manuscript and agree to its submission and publication. Individuals who contributed to the work but do not meet the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged appropriately, subject to their permission where necessary.

Guest authorship, honorary authorship, purchased authorship, and ghost authorship are not acceptable. Changes to the author list after submission, including the addition, removal, or rearrangement of authors, must be justified and may require written agreement from all affected authors.

Corresponding Author Responsibilities

The corresponding author is responsible for communication with the journal throughout submission, peer review, revision, production, and publication. The corresponding author must ensure that all authors have approved the manuscript, authorship order, revisions, declarations, and final proofs.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors must disclose any financial, professional, institutional, personal, academic, or other relationships that could reasonably be perceived as influencing the research or its interpretation.

Editors and reviewers must also disclose potential conflicts of interest. Individuals with conflicts that could compromise, or reasonably appear to compromise, the impartiality of the editorial or review process should not participate in decisions concerning the manuscript.

Funding Disclosure

Authors must clearly identify all sources of financial support for the research and publication of the work. Where applicable, grant numbers and funding organizations should be provided. If the research received no external funding, this should be stated explicitly.

Research Involving Human Participants

Research involving human participants must comply with applicable ethical standards, institutional requirements, and relevant national or international regulations. Where required, authors must obtain approval from an appropriate institutional review board, research ethics committee, or equivalent body before conducting the research.

Manuscripts involving human participants should identify the approving body and, where applicable, provide the approval or reference number. Authors must also state whether informed consent was obtained from participants when required.

Privacy, Confidentiality, and Informed Consent

Authors must protect the privacy and confidentiality of research participants. Personally identifiable information should not be published unless it is essential to the scholarly purpose of the article and appropriate informed consent for publication has been obtained.

Particular care must be taken with vulnerable participants, students, minors, institutional records, interview transcripts, classroom data, and other potentially identifiable research materials.

Research Involving Children and Vulnerable Participants

Research involving children, minors, or other vulnerable populations must receive appropriate ethical oversight. Where required, informed consent from parents or legal guardians and assent from participants should be obtained and documented.

Data Accuracy, Availability, and Retention

Authors are responsible for maintaining accurate research records and should retain relevant data and documentation for an appropriate period in accordance with institutional, disciplinary, ethical, and legal requirements.

Authors are encouraged to provide a clear data availability statement. Where data can be shared ethically and legally, authors should indicate how the supporting data may be accessed. Where data cannot be made publicly available because of privacy, confidentiality, ethical, legal, contractual, or proprietary restrictions, these limitations should be explained.

Image, Figure, and Data Manipulation

Authors must not manipulate figures, images, tables, transcripts, datasets, or other research materials in ways that could misrepresent the original evidence. Adjustments made for clarity or presentation must not alter the substantive meaning of the underlying material.

The journal may request original data, source files, or supporting documentation when questions arise about the integrity of submitted or published material.

Citation and Reference Ethics

References must accurately represent the sources used in the manuscript. Authors should cite relevant primary and secondary scholarship fairly and should not include references solely for the purpose of artificially increasing citation counts.

Citation manipulation, excessive self-citation without scholarly justification, coercive citation, citation cartels, fabricated references, and deliberate citation of irrelevant sources are unacceptable. References submitted to The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL should be prepared according to the journal's required APA style.

Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Authors must remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, integrity, and scholarly content of their manuscripts regardless of whether artificial intelligence tools have been used during preparation.

Generative artificial intelligence tools must not be listed as authors because they cannot take responsibility for the work, approve the final manuscript, disclose conflicts of interest, or enter into publishing agreements.

Where generative AI or AI-assisted technologies have been used for substantive purposes, authors should disclose their use transparently in accordance with the journal's policy. Routine use solely for language editing, grammar correction, or improvement of readability should not replace author verification. Authors remain responsible for checking all AI-assisted text, references, factual claims, quotations, analyses, and interpretations before submission.

Peer Review Ethics

The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL follows a single-blind peer-review process. The identities of reviewers are normally not disclosed to authors.

Reviewers are expected to provide objective, constructive, evidence-based, and respectful evaluations. Personal criticism, discriminatory language, hostile comments, or comments unrelated to the scholarly quality of the manuscript are not acceptable.

Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited where this materially affects the manuscript. They should not request citations to their own publications unless those references are genuinely relevant to improving the scholarly quality of the paper.

Reviewer Confidentiality

Manuscripts received for peer review are confidential documents. Reviewers must not share, reproduce, distribute, discuss, upload, or otherwise disclose manuscript content to unauthorized persons.

Reviewers must not use unpublished information, ideas, methods, arguments, or data obtained through peer review for personal, professional, academic, financial, or competitive advantage.

Use of Artificial Intelligence by Reviewers

Reviewers must preserve manuscript confidentiality. Confidential or unpublished manuscripts, or substantial portions of them, should not be uploaded to external generative AI systems or other services where confidentiality, data retention, intellectual property, or privacy cannot be assured.

Reviewers remain personally responsible for the content, accuracy, fairness, and scholarly quality of their review reports.

Editorial Responsibilities

Editors of The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL are responsible for evaluating manuscripts fairly and independently on the basis of scholarly merit, relevance to the journal's scope, originality, methodological quality, clarity, and contribution to knowledge.

Editorial decisions must not be influenced by an author's nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, institutional affiliation, political views, personal relationships, or other characteristics unrelated to the scholarly content of the manuscript.

Editors must protect the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts, reviewer identities, correspondence, and unpublished information obtained during the editorial process.

Editorial Conflicts of Interest

Editors should not manage manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest arising from personal, professional, institutional, financial, collaborative, supervisory, or competitive relationships with the authors or subject matter.

Such manuscripts should be assigned to another qualified editor who can oversee the review and decision process independently.

Editorial Independence

Editorial decisions are based on academic and editorial considerations. Commercial, institutional, political, financial, or personal interests should not interfere with decisions concerning acceptance, revision, or rejection.

Research Misconduct

The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL takes allegations of research and publication misconduct seriously. Potential misconduct may include, but is not limited to, plagiarism, fabricated or falsified data, manipulated evidence, duplicate publication, undisclosed conflicts of interest, inappropriate authorship, citation manipulation, peer-review manipulation, unethical research practices, or deliberate misrepresentation of findings.

When credible concerns are raised, the journal may request explanations, original data, ethical approvals, correspondence, or other supporting documentation. Where appropriate, the journal may contact authors' institutions, funders, ethics committees, or other relevant bodies.

Peer-Review Manipulation

Any attempt to manipulate the peer-review process is considered serious misconduct. This includes providing false reviewer identities, fabricated email addresses, impersonating reviewers, creating fraudulent reviewer accounts, interfering with editorial systems, or attempting to influence reviewer selection improperly.

A manuscript may be rejected or a published article may be subject to correction or retraction if evidence of peer-review manipulation is established.

Corrections and Amendments

The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL is committed to maintaining the accuracy and integrity of the scholarly record. When an error is identified in a published article that does not invalidate the main findings, the journal may publish an appropriate correction, amendment, or other notice linked to the original article.

Retractions

Retraction may be considered when there is clear evidence that published findings are unreliable because of fabrication, falsification, major error, plagiarism, unethical research, duplicate publication, manipulation of the publication process, or other serious breaches of publication ethics.

A retracted article will normally remain part of the scholarly record but will be clearly identified as retracted, and an explanatory retraction notice will be published where appropriate.

Expressions of Concern

An expression of concern may be issued when serious questions have been raised about a published article but sufficient evidence is not yet available to justify correction or retraction, particularly when an institutional or other formal investigation is ongoing.

Complaints and Appeals

Authors may raise concerns regarding editorial procedures or appeal an editorial decision when they believe that a substantive scholarly or procedural error has occurred. Appeals should clearly explain the grounds for reconsideration and provide relevant evidence.

Appeals are not intended merely to express disagreement with reviewer comments or editorial judgement. Where appropriate, an appeal may be assessed by an editor who was not primarily responsible for the original decision.

Post-Publication Concerns

Readers, authors, reviewers, and other members of the scholarly community are encouraged to inform the editorial office of credible concerns regarding published content. Concerns should be supported by sufficient information to permit an objective assessment.

The journal will evaluate such concerns fairly and, where necessary, take appropriate action to protect the integrity of the scholarly record.

Copyright and Open Access

The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL is a diamond open access journal. Readers may access published articles without subscription charges, and authors are not required to pay article processing charges for standard publication.

Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License . This license permits sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, including commercial use, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and source, a link to the license is provided, and any changes are indicated.

Publication Schedule and Continuous Publication

The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL publishes two issues per year. Manuscripts that successfully complete peer review, revision, acceptance, typesetting, and proofreading may be published in the journal's current running issue without waiting for all articles assigned to that issue to be completed.

Commitment to the Scholarly Record

The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL is committed to preserving the reliability, transparency, accessibility, and integrity of the scholarly record. Authors, reviewers, and editors share responsibility for ensuring that research is communicated accurately, ethically, and in a manner that supports responsible scholarship in applied linguistics, language education, TEFL, and related fields.