Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Communication research involving individuals, communities, media users, journalists, public-relations practitioners, organizations, online communities, audiences, or other participants through surveys, interviews, experiments, focus groups, observations, digital ethnography, social-media research, behavioral data, or identifiable records must comply with applicable institutional, national, and professional ethical requirements.

• The approving ethics committee or institutional review board must be identified where approval is required.
• The ethics approval/reference number should be reported where applicable.
• Authors must explain how informed consent was obtained where required.
• An approved waiver of consent must be disclosed and justified.
• Participant privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality must be protected.
• Consent for publication is required where participants may reasonably be identified.
• Additional safeguards must be reported when minors, vulnerable communities, sensitive populations, or high-risk digital communities are involved.

Communication research may involve social-media content, digital traces, private messages, audience analytics, media archives, organizational communication records, platform data, online-community interactions, audiovisual materials, or other potentially sensitive or proprietary communication data.

• Authors must have lawful and ethically appropriate access to the data used.
• Personally identifiable communication data must be anonymized or de-identified where appropriate.
• Private messages, closed-group discussions, confidential organizational communication, and restricted online content must not be disclosed without appropriate authorization.
• Platform terms of service, institutional rules, contractual obligations, and third-party restrictions must be respected.
• Public availability of digital content does not automatically eliminate ethical responsibilities toward users or communities.
• Screenshots, usernames, photographs, quotations, audiovisual material, and other potentially identifying information must be handled responsibly.
• Restrictions affecting data sharing must be stated in the Data Availability Statement.

Authors must report research methods and analytical procedures with sufficient clarity to permit scientific evaluation and, where possible, replication.

• Research design and methodological approach must be clearly identified.
• Population, sample, participants, media sources, communication texts, organizations, platforms, communities, cases, or datasets must be explained.
• Sampling, recruitment, corpus selection, case selection, and inclusion or exclusion procedures must be transparent.
• Questionnaires, interview protocols, coding frameworks, scales, content-analysis instruments, or other research tools must be described.
• Statistical, qualitative, discourse, semiotic, content-analysis, network-analysis, computational, or mixed-method procedures must be explained.
• Intercoder reliability, validity, reliability, trustworthiness, triangulation, or equivalent quality procedures should be reported where applicable.
• Digital-data collection, scraping, API use, platform selection, and data-processing procedures should be described where relevant.
• Assumptions, exclusions, transformations, robustness tests, and analytical decisions should be reported where relevant.
• Systematic reviews should follow appropriate transparent reporting frameworks where applicable.

Editors are responsible for maintaining a fair, confidential, independent, and evidence-based editorial process.

• Base decisions on scholarly quality, originality, methodology, relevance, and ethical compliance.
• Apply journal policies consistently and without inappropriate discrimination.
• Maintain confidentiality of manuscripts, reviewer reports, author responses, and editorial records.
• Protect reviewer identities under the journal's double-blind model.
• Declare conflicts of interest and recuse themselves when impartiality may be compromised.
• Select reviewers with appropriate communication-science, media-studies, methodological, or interdisciplinary expertise.
• Prevent coercive citation, authorship manipulation, peer-review manipulation, and inappropriate editorial influence.
• Address complaints, appeals, and integrity concerns fairly.
• Take proportionate corrective action when the scholarly record is unreliable.
• Ensure that APC payment or waiver status does not influence editorial decisions.

• Provide objective, constructive, respectful, independent, and timely assessments.
• Accept assignments only when appropriate expertise and sufficient time are available.
• Treat manuscripts, datasets, supplementary files, audiovisual material, and correspondence as confidential.
• Disclose financial, professional, institutional, collaborative, academic, or personal conflicts.
• Decline reviews where impartiality may reasonably be compromised.
• Report suspected plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, duplicate publication, unethical data collection, or other misconduct confidentially to the editor.
• Avoid personal criticism, hostile language, unsupported allegations, and discriminatory comments.
• Recommend citations only when genuinely relevant to the manuscript.
• Never use unpublished information for personal or professional advantage.
• Do not upload confidential manuscripts or unpublished data to public generative AI systems.

• Submit original work that has not been formally published and is not under review elsewhere.
• Report methods, analyses, findings, limitations, and conclusions honestly and accurately.
• Retain supporting data, coding records, transcripts, media materials, and research documentation where appropriate.
• Provide accurate citations and verifiable references.
• Obtain required ethics approvals, informed consent, permissions, copyright authorization, and data-use authorization.
• Respect privacy, confidentiality, intellectual-property rights, and responsible use of communication and media materials.
• Disclose funding sources and the role of funders.
• Disclose actual or potential conflicts of interest.
• Ensure all listed authors qualify for authorship.
• Obtain approval from all authors for the submitted version and author order.
• Disclose relevant use of generative AI.
• Notify the journal promptly if a significant error or ethical problem is discovered.

Authorship must reflect substantial scholarly contribution and accountability. Authors should make meaningful intellectual contributions to the research and accept responsibility for the integrity of the published work.

1. Substantial contribution to the conception/design or acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data;
2. Drafting or critical intellectual review of the manuscript;
3. Final approval of the version to be published; and
4. Agreement to be accountable for the accuracy and integrity of the work.

• Author contributions should be described using appropriate CRediT roles.
• Non-author contributors should be acknowledged with permission.
• Authorship changes require written justification and agreement from all affected authors.
• Artificial intelligence tools cannot qualify as authors.

Authors, reviewers, editors, and Editorial Board members must disclose relationships that may influence, or reasonably appear to influence, their judgment.

Authors must identify funding sources, grant numbers where applicable, and the role of the funder in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, and publication decisions.

• A Data Availability Statement must be included in research manuscripts.
• Data repositories, persistent identifiers, access conditions, or restrictions should be reported.
• De-identified datasets, coding schemes, analytical code, interview guides, questionnaires, media corpora, or supplementary materials should be shared where ethically and legally possible.
• Restrictions arising from privacy, confidentiality, copyright, platform policies, contracts, or proprietary data must be explained.
• Fabrication, concealed deletion, inappropriate alteration, selective exclusion, or misleading presentation of communication data is prohibited.
• The Editorial Team may request underlying data, coding sheets, transcripts, analytical files, or supporting documentation when necessary to evaluate research integrity.

All manuscripts may be screened using Turnitin. The journal normally requires an overall similarity index below 20%, subject to editorial assessment of the nature and location of the matching material.

Unattributed copying, inappropriate paraphrasing, translation plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and undisclosed reuse of previously published material are prohibited.

• AI must not replace human scholarly judgment or authorship responsibility.
• Meaningful AI-assisted activity must be disclosed according to journal policy.
• Authors remain fully responsible for accuracy, originality, references, data interpretation, and conclusions.
• AI tools cannot be listed as authors or co-authors.
• AI-generated references, data, analyses, transcripts, images, audiovisual material, or interpretations must be independently verified.
• Editors must not upload confidential manuscripts, reviewer reports, unpublished research materials, or identifiable participant data to public generative AI systems.
• Reviewers must not upload confidential manuscripts or unpublished data to public generative AI systems.
• AI-assisted material must be checked for fabricated citations, factual errors, bias, misleading content, synthetic-media risks, and inappropriate manipulation.
• Final editorial and peer-review decisions must remain under human responsibility.

Eligible manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review by at least two independent reviewers.

• Reviewer selection is based on communication-science, media-studies, interdisciplinary, and methodological expertise as appropriate.
• Authors and reviewers remain anonymous to one another during review.
• Reviewer recommendations inform, but do not determine, the final editorial decision.
• Conflicting reviewer recommendations may result in additional review.
• Editors who are authors or have conflicts must not participate in handling the manuscript.
• Acceptance or rejection is based on scholarly merit rather than financial or commercial considerations.

The journal does not tolerate conduct that undermines the reliability, transparency, fairness, or integrity of scholarly publishing.

Credible concerns are evaluated fairly, confidentially, consistently, and without presuming misconduct before relevant evidence has been assessed.

1. Initial assessment: determine whether the concern is specific, credible, relevant, and within the journal's responsibility.
2. Clarification: request explanations, original data, transcripts, coding records, media files, communication records, or supporting evidence where necessary.
3. Independent advice: seek communication-science, methodological, statistical, ethical, technological, media-law, or legal expertise where appropriate.
4. Institutional coordination: contact institutions, research-integrity offices, funders, ethics committees, media organizations, digital platforms, or other responsible bodies where necessary.
5. Editorial action: take proportionate action according to the evidence and seriousness of the concern.

Formal notices will identify the affected article, explain the reason for the action, remain freely accessible, and be linked permanently to the scholarly record where applicable.

A manuscript is not considered formally withdrawn until the Editorial Office has reviewed the withdrawal request and provided written confirmation. Ethical concerns such as duplicate submission, authorship disputes, suspected plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, unethical data collection, or research misconduct may continue to be investigated even if an author requests withdrawal.

Authors and other stakeholders may raise concerns about editorial procedures, reviewer conduct, conflicts of interest, confidentiality, citation coercion, authorship handling, publication charges, ethical matters, or research-integrity procedures.

An editorial appeal should identify a material factual error, procedural irregularity, substantial misunderstanding, inappropriate application of journal policy, or relevant evidence that was overlooked.

Where independent assessment is necessary, complaints or appeals will be considered by an editor or qualified person who was not materially involved in the original matter.

• Authors must submit original work and respect third-party intellectual-property rights.
• Permission must be obtained for copyrighted third-party material where required.
• Permission must also be obtained for protected photographs, screenshots, audiovisual content, media extracts, questionnaires, proprietary datasets, or restricted communication materials where applicable.
• Authors retain the full copyright of their work.
• The journal receives a non-exclusive right of first publication.

Manuscripts, reviewer reports, author responses, ethical documents, participant information, confidential communication data, allegations, data files, investigations, and editorial correspondence are treated as confidential.

The journal maintains appropriate editorial records to document manuscript decisions, reviewer activity, revisions, ethical assessments, complaints, appeals, corrections, and integrity investigations in accordance with applicable legal and institutional requirements.