All manuscripts are subject to peer review and are expected to meet standards of academic excellence. If approved by the editor, submissions will be considered by peer-reviewers, whose identities will remain anonymous to the authors. Our Research Integrity team will occasionally seek advice outside standard peer review, for example, on submissions with serious ethical, security, biosecurity, or societal implications. We may consult experts and the academic editor before deciding on appropriate actions, including but not limited to: recruiting reviewers with specific expertise, assessment by additional editors, and declining to further consider a submission.

All journals published by SSRG are committed to publishing only original material, i.e., material that has neither been published elsewhere, nor is under review elsewhere. SSRG uses software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized will incur plagiarism sanctions.

Manuscripts that are found to have been published elsewhere, or to be under review elsewhere, will incur duplicate submission / publication sanctions. If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they are required to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions beyond those of the previous work.

Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations whose primary purpose is to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will incur citation manipulation sanctions.

Submitted manuscripts that are found to have either fabricated or falsified experimental results, including the manipulation of images, will incur data fabrication and falsification sanctions.

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. It is important to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students, research scholar, project assistant, and laboratory technicians.

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles.

Conflicts of interest (COIs, also known as ‘competing interests’) occur when issues outside research could be reasonably perceived to affect the neutrality or objectivity of the work or its assessment. Potential conflicts of interest must be declared – whether or not they actually had an influence – to allow informed decisions.

If unsure, declare a potential interest or discuss with the editorial office. Undeclared interests may incur sanctions. Submissions with undeclared conflicts that are later revealed may be rejected. Published articles may need to be re-assessed, have a corrigendum published, or in serious cases be retracted.

Financial – funding and other payments, goods and services received or expected by the authors.
Affiliations – being employed by, on the advisory board for, or a member of an organization with an interest.
Intellectual property – patents or trademarks owned by someone or their organization.
Personal – friends, family, relationships, and other close personal connections.
Ideology – beliefs or activism, e.g. political or religious, relevant to the work.
Academic – competitors or someone whose work is critiqued.

Authors must declare all potential interests in a ‘Conflicts of interest’ section, which should explain why the interest may be a conflict. If there are none, the authors should state “The author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper.”

Authors must declare current or recent funding (including for article processing charges) and other payments, goods or services that might influence the work. All funding, whether a conflict or not, must be declared in the ‘Acknowledgments’.

The involvement of anyone other than the authors who 1) has an interest in the outcome of the work; 2) is affiliated to an organization with such an interest; or 3) was employed or paid by a funder, in the commissioning, conception, planning, design, conduct, or analysis of the work, the preparation or editing of the manuscript, or the decision to publish must be declared.

Editors and reviewers should decline to be involved with a submission when they:

• Have a recent publication or current submission with any author
• Share or recently shared an affiliation with any author
• Collaborate or recently collaborated with any author
• Have a close personal connection to any author
• Have a financial interest in the subject of the work
• Feel unable to be objective

Reviewers must declare any remaining interests in the ‘Confidential’ section of the review form, which will be considered by the editor.

In the event that there are documented violations, the following sanctions will be applied:

• Immediate rejection of the infringing manuscript
• Immediate rejection of every other manuscript submitted by any of the authors
• Prohibition against all of the authors for any new submissions for a minimum of 36 months
• Prohibition against all of the authors from serving on the Editorial Board

In egregious cases, the publisher reserves the right to impose additional sanctions.

It is important that the authors record the results of their research in a form that can be reviewed before publication and by other researchers after publication. Fabrication, like reporting results that were never conducted, is a form of scientific misconduct and regarded as highly unethical.

The authors should submit their research papers in the journal's precise format. The information must be concise, authentic and give details of the research experiments performed. Authors should rewrite borrowed information in their own words and cite sources properly.

Authorship credit should be based on substantial contributions such as conception, design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, drafting, and approval. Individuals not meeting these criteria may be acknowledged.

The editor of a journal has full authority to accept or reject a submitted paper. Editors should judge all submissions on scientific merit and minimize influence of other factors. The decision should be fair, timely, and objective.

AI policy – The utilization of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies within scientific writing should be approached with caution. This policy pertains solely to the writing process and does not extend to AI tools for data analysis and deriving insights.