Journal Policies, Ethics

Authorship and Author Responsibilities

Chetana follows the guidelines which state that, in order to qualify for authorship of a manuscript, the following criteria should be observed:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content
• Provide approval for publication of the content
• Agree 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.
• Contributors who do not meet these criteria, but nonetheless provided important contributions to the final manuscript, should be included in the acknowledgement section. It is the author's responsibility to get written approval by persons named in the acknowledgment section.
• Manuscripts prepared and written by commercial entities (fake-paper factories, "paper mills") on behalf of researchers listed as authors on the manuscript do not meet Chetanas' policies and will not be considered for publication. Chetana will take proactive actions to reject suspicious manuscripts before peer review.

Author Contributions

To provide appropriate credit to all authors, as well as assigning responsibility and accountability for published work, individual contributions should be specified as an Author Contributions Statement. The Author Contributions Statement is mandatory. It should represent all the authors and is to be included upon submission. It can be up to several sentences long and should briefly describe the tasks of individual authors. Please list only 2 initials for each author, without full stops, but separated by commas (for example JC, JS). In the case of two authors with the same initials, please use their middle initial to differentiate between them (for example REW, RSW) or second letter of the last name (for example RWe, RWa). Please see an example here:

"AB, CZD, and EF contributed to conception and design of the study. AB organized the database. CYD performed the statistical analysis. EF wrote the first draft of the manuscript. GH, IJ, AB, and EF wrote sections of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version."

Corresponding Authors

The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal and editorial office during the submission process, throughout peer review, and during publication. The corresponding author is also responsible for ensuring that the submission adheres to all journal requirements including, but not exclusive to, details of authorship, study ethics and ethics approval, clinical trial registration documents, and conflict of interest declaration. The corresponding author should also be available post-publication to respond to any queries or critiques.

Requests to modify the author list after submission should be made to the editorial office using the authorship change form.

Research integrity: how to reuse text

Material submitted to Chetana must comply with the following policies to ensure ethical publication of academic work.

Original Content and Duplicate Publication

Chetana only publishes original content. Authors confirm the submission of original content in the terms and conditions upon submission. Manuscripts submitted to Chetana must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere, either in whole or in part. If an article has been previously submitted for publication elsewhere, Chetana will only consider publication if the article has been definitively rejected by the other publisher(s) at the point of submission to Chetana.

Fabrication and Falsification

Chetana opposes both the fabrication of data or images (that is, fake or made-up data) and falsification of data or images (that is, the intentional misrepresentation or deceptive manipulation of data).

Redundant Publication

Chetana considers the submission and publication of very similar articles based on the same experiment or study to be unethical.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism occurs when an author attempts to present previously published work as original content. Every manuscript submitted to Chetana is screened for textual overlap by the software. Manuscripts found to contain textual overlap are not considered for publication by Chetana. For more details on what constitutes plagiarism, please see 'Plagiarism and duplication' below.

We reserve the right to contact the affiliated institutions of authors who have not acted according to good research and publication practices.

Plagiarism and Duplication

Chetana checks all submitted manuscripts for plagiarism and duplication, and publishes only original content. Those manuscripts where plagiarism or duplication is shown to have occurred will not be considered for publication in a Chetana journal. It is required that all submissions consist of content that has not been published previously

Theses and Dissertations

Chetana allows the inclusion of content which first appeared in an author's thesis so long as this is the only form in which it has appeared, is in line with the author's university policy, and can be accessed online. If the thesis is not archived online, it is considered original, unpublished data and is subject to the unpublished data restrictions of some article types. Inclusion of material from theses or dissertations should be noted in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript and cited accordingly in the reference list. For some examples, please check the 'References' section of our author guidelines.

Conferences, Proceedings, and Abstracts

Manuscripts that first appeared as conference papers must be expanded upon if they are to be considered as original work. Authors are required to add a substantial amount of original content in the form of new raw material (experiments, data) or new treatment of old data sets which lead to original discussion and/or conclusions, providing value that significantly exceeds the original conference version. As a rule of thumb, at least 30% of the content must be original. Authors submitting such work are required to:

• Seek permission for reuse of the published conference paper if the author does not hold the copyright
• Cite the conference in the acknowledgements section, or the references section if applicable.

Editorial Policies

Conflicts of Interest

A conflict of interest can be anything potentially interfering with, or that could be perceived as interfering with, full and objective peer review, decision-making or publication of articles submitted to Chetana. Personal, financial, and professional affiliations or relationships can be perceived as conflicts of interest.

All authors and members of Chetana editorial boards are required to disclose any actual and potential conflicts of interest at submission or upon accepting an editorial or review assignment.

The Chetana review system is designed to guarantee the most transparent and objective editorial and review process, and because the handling editor's and reviewers' names are made public upon the publication of articles, conflicts of interest will be widely apparent.

Failure to declare competing interests can result in the rejection of a manuscript. If an undisclosed competing interest comes to light after publication, Chetana will take action in accordance with internal policies and Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines.

Anything that can be perceived as a potential conflict of interest should be disclosed within the statements section, during submission. A conflict of interest statement will be automatically generated, included in the generated PDF file for peer review, and in the final publication version of the article.

What should I disclose?

As an author, disclosure of any potential conflicts of interest should be done during the submission process. Consider the following questions and make sure you disclose any positive answers.

Potential Conflicts of Interest: Authors

Did you or your institution at any time receive payment or services from a third party for any aspect of the submitted work?

Do you have financial relationships with entities that could be perceived to influence, or that give the appearance of potentially influencing, what you wrote in the submitted work?

Do you have any patents and copyrights, whether pending, issued, licensed, and/or receiving royalties, related to the research?

Do you have other relationships or activities that readers could perceive to have influenced, or that give the appearance of potentially influencing, what you wrote in the submitted work?

If you failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest during submission, or in case of doubt, please contact the Chetana editorial office at editorial.office@Chetanain.org with the details of the potential conflicts as soon as possible.

For commercial affiliations, all authors must be accounted for. We recommend using the following template:

• [AUTHOR NAME] was employed by [COMPANY]. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

For commercial funding, the role of the funder must be declared. We recommend the following statements:

• The authors declare that this study received funding from [FUNDER NAME]. The funder had the following involvement with the study: [DESCRIPTION OF INVOLVEMENT]
• The authors declare that this study received funding from [FUNDER NAME]. The funder was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, or the decision to submit it for publication.

What about Editors and Reviewers?

Handling editors and reviewers will be asked to consider the following potential conflicts of interest before accepting any editing or review assignment.

Potential conflicts of interest: editors and reviewers

Family

Are any of the authors a spouse or significant other, a member of the same family, or a very close personal friend?

Review editors should also not be a member of the same family as the handling editor.

Collaborations

Are you currently hosting or have hosted a Chetana Research Topic with any of the authors within the past 2 years?

Are you currently collaborating or have you collaborated on a research project or a publication with any of the authors within the past 2 years?

Are you currently collaborating or have you collaborated with any of the authors as an advisor or in any other direct supervisory capacity in the past 5 years?

Are you currently collaborating or have you collaborated with any of the authors as a student or in any other direct subordinate capacity in the past 5 years?

Note: Review editors should not accept assignments if they have a close professional relationship with the handling editor, which in their view could affect the objectivity of the review.

Affiliation

Are you affiliated with the same institution as any of the authors? If so, has this resulted in interactions, collaborations, or mutual interests with the authors that would compromise your impartiality in conducting this review?

Are you a current member of a committee or department that coincides with an affiliation with any of the authors?

Financial

Do you have a business or professional partnership with any author?

Do you have financial interests or business relations with any organization involved in this research or in the preparation of the manuscript?

Do you have any financial interest or competing interests in the content of the manuscript that might affect your ability to perform an objective review?

Funding disclosure

Details of all funding sources must be provided in the funding section of the manuscript, including grant numbers, if applicable. All Chetana articles are published with open access under the CC-BY Creative Commons attribution license. Articles published with Chetana automatically fulfiLl or exceed the requirements for open access mandated by many institutions and funding bodies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council, Research Councils UK, and the Welcome Trust. Chetana submits funding data to the Open Funder Registry, which is a funder identification service from CrossRef resulting from collaboration between scholarly publishers and funding agencies.

Disclaimer

Any necessary disclaimers which must be included in the published article should be clearly indicated in the manuscript.