Research Integrity

Plagiarism Statement (General)

Studies in African Linguistics does not accept articles containing material plagiarized from other publications or authors.

For the purposes of this policy, plagiarism is defined as copying of or reliance on work — including text, images and data — by others or yourself without proper attribution. Please be aware that you can plagiarize yourself; you must provide proper attribution in all cases where your previously published material or previously used data or images are included in your manuscript.

Plagiarism detected prior to publication will cause rejection of your manuscript. Plagiarism detected after publication will cause the published article to be amended to state that it contains plagiarized material; in extreme cases of plagiarism, the publication will be removed at the Editors’ discretion, and the reason for removal stated on the journal's website.

Studies in African Linguistics does not consider the following situations to be plagiarism when proper attribution is made:

  • Translations into English of a previously published paper not in English;
  • Publication of all or part of a revised thesis or dissertation;
  • Publication of a paper previously made public as a conference presentation, white paper, technical report, or preprint

Studies in African Linguistics follows workflows developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to deal with cases of plagiarism

Use of Third-Party Copyrighted Materials

When submitting your manuscript, please be mindful of copyright laws in the United States and (if outside the U.S.) your home country. Studies in African Linguistics respects the intellectual property of scholars, students, and publishers, and we ask that you secure appropriate permissions or evaluate whether your incorporation of images, figures, charts, quotations, and other materials falls within the scope of fair use/fair dealing.

If you are incorporating published materials that you have previously authored, be aware that in many cases your publisher may now own the copyright and you may need to seek permission to reprint your own work.

The University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries provides resources on copyright and fair use, with an emphasis on U.S. Copyright Law: https://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/copyright

Correction, Retraction, and Removal of Articles

Correction. Despite the best of efforts, errors occur and their timely and effective remedy are considered the mark of responsible authors and editors. Studies in African Linguistics will publish a correction if the scholarly record is seriously affected (e.g., if accuracy/intended meaning, scientific reproducibility, author reputation, or journal reputation is judged to be compromised). Corrections that do not affect the contribution in a material way or significantly alter the reader's understanding of the contribution, such as misspellings or grammatical errors, will not be published. When a correction is published, it will link to and from the work. The correction will be added to the original work so that readers will receive the original work and the correction. All corrections will be as concise as possible.

Retraction. Studies in African Linguistics reserves the right to retract items, with a retraction defined as a public disavowal, not an erasure or removal. Retractions will occur if the editors and editorial board finds that the main conclusion of the work is undermined or if subsequent information about the work comes to light of which the authors or the editors were not aware at the time of publication. Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, inaccurate claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data will also result in retraction of the work.

Removal. Some circumstances may necessitate removal of a work from Studies in African Linguistics. This will occur when the article is judged by the editors and editorial board to be defamatory, if it infringes on legal rights, or if there is a reasonable expectation that it will be subject to a court order. The bibliographic information about the work will be retained online, but the work will no longer be available through Studies in African Linguistics. A note will be added to indicate that the item was removed for legal reasons.

Data-Sharing Policy

Authors of research papers submitted for publication in [journal] are encouraged to make the data underlying their articles available online whenever possible. For the purposes of this policy, the term "data" is understood broadly and refers to both quantitative and qualitative research outputs, spanning observations and analysis of social settings (producing numbers, texts, images, multimedia or other content) to numbers attained through instrumental and other raw data gathering efforts, quantitative analysis, text mining, or citation analysis, as well as protocols, methods, and code used to generate any specific finding reported in the paper. The [journal] editorial board prefers that the data be submitted as supplemental files accompanying the article, or be archived in a secure repository that provides a persistent identifier, assures long-term access, and provides sufficient documentation and metadata to support re-use by other investigators. Acceptable solutions include institutional repositories; repositories specifically focused on data curation, or domain specific repositories. If there is no relevant public repository available, and the data cannot easily be included in a supplement, authors should describe how the data are being curated and made available or, in the case where they cannot be made available (e.g., IRB restrictions), why that is so. In any case, a citation to the dataset should be made in the article itself in accordance with the data citation principles of the FORCE11 "Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles", including an ORCID for the researcher(s) associated with the data. Finally, we recommend that whenever possible authors explicitly define the terms of re-use by assigning a license to their data, choosing, for instance, among Creative Commons or Open Data Commons licenses.

The Studies in African Linguistics data policy does not require data publication and citation at this time due to still-emergent standards for data peer review; the lack of sufficiently robust and distributed infrastructure to support the variety of disciplinary research occurring in our field; uncertainty whether Studies in African Linguistics should provide a third mode of data publication in the form of “data papers” or “data descriptors”; and insufficient preparation and notification to Studies in African Linguistics contributors to ensure datasets are properly curated with the aim of publication. Authors unable to share their data must provide written explanation of this circumstance in their cover letter at the time of submission.