Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Research involving individuals through interviews, focus groups, surveys, participant observation, ethnography, narrative inquiry, phenomenological studies, case studies, health-literacy assessments, behavioral data, identifiable records, or other human-participant methods 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, dignity, autonomy, and confidentiality must be protected.
• Consent for publication is required where participants may reasonably be identified through quotations, narratives, images, recordings, or contextual details.
• Additional safeguards must be reported when vulnerable individuals or populations are involved.

Health-literacy and qualitative research may involve sensitive health information, interview transcripts, field notes, personal narratives, patient experiences, caregiver information, healthcare records, audio or video recordings, community data, institutional documents, or other identifiable or confidential materials.

• Authors must have lawful and ethically appropriate access to all data used.
• Identifiable or sensitive health information must be anonymized or de-identified where appropriate.
• Participants, patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, communities, and institutions must be protected from unnecessary identification or harm.
• Direct quotations must be presented in a manner that minimizes the risk of participant identification where required.
• Audio, video, images, and other identifiable materials require appropriate consent and secure handling.
• Restrictions affecting data sharing must be stated transparently in the Data Availability Statement.

Authors must report research methods, qualitative procedures, analytical strategies, and interpretive processes with sufficient clarity to permit scientific evaluation and methodological transparency.

• Research design and qualitative or mixed-method approach must be clearly identified.
• Research setting, population, participants, cases, communities, institutions, or data sources must be explained.
• Sampling strategy, recruitment, inclusion criteria, and participant-selection procedures must be transparent.
• Interview guides, observation frameworks, health-literacy instruments, coding frameworks, or data-collection tools should be described where relevant.
• Data-collection procedures, interview duration, recording, transcription, translation, and fieldwork processes should be reported.
• Analytical approaches such as thematic analysis, content analysis, grounded theory, phenomenological analysis, discourse analysis, narrative analysis, or other qualitative methods must be explained.
• Reflexivity, researcher positioning, credibility, triangulation, member checking, audit trails, or other strategies for trustworthiness should be reported where applicable.
• Qualitative studies should follow appropriate reporting standards such as COREQ or other relevant frameworks where applicable.

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

• Base decisions on scholarly quality, originality, methodological rigor, relevance, ethical compliance, and transparency.
• 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 health-literacy, qualitative-research, healthcare, social-science, and methodological 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, interview data, transcripts, participant information, supplementary files, 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 participant treatment, data manipulation, 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 participant narratives, interview data, healthcare information, or confidential findings 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 research context, methods, participant recruitment, data collection, analysis, interpretations, limitations, and conclusions honestly and accurately.
• Retain supporting transcripts, field notes, coding records, audit trails, ethical documentation, and relevant research records where appropriate.
• Provide accurate citations and verifiable references.
• Obtain required ethics approvals, informed consent, permissions, and data-use authorization.
• 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, ethical issue, confidentiality concern, or research-integrity problem is discovered.

Authorship must reflect substantial scholarly contribution and accountability. The journal applies the four authorship criteria recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

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.
• Transcribers, translators, research assistants, facilitators, fieldworkers, community partners, or other contributors who do not meet authorship criteria should be acknowledged appropriately and 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 funders in study design, participant recruitment, 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 where appropriate.
• De-identified qualitative data, coding frameworks, interview guides, instruments, analytical files, or supplementary material should be shared where ethically and legally possible.
• Qualitative datasets may require restricted access because even de-identified transcripts can contain contextual information that may permit re-identification.
• Restrictions arising from participant privacy, confidentiality, ethics approval, consent conditions, institutional agreements, or sensitive health information must be explained.
• Fabrication, concealed deletion, inappropriate alteration, selective exclusion, invented quotations, or misleading presentation of qualitative or health data is prohibited.
• The Editorial Team may request underlying transcripts, field notes, coding records, ethical documentation, or other supporting evidence 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, qualitative interpretation, or authorship responsibility.
• Meaningful AI-assisted activity must be disclosed according to journal policy.
• Authors remain fully responsible for accuracy, originality, references, coding, interpretation, quotations, and conclusions.
• AI tools cannot be listed as authors or co-authors.
• AI-generated references, coding suggestions, themes, summaries, translations, analyses, or interpretations must be independently verified by the authors.
• Reviewers and editors must not upload confidential manuscripts, interview transcripts, participant information, or unpublished health data to public generative AI systems.
• AI-assisted material must be checked for fabricated citations, invented participant quotations, factual errors, bias, decontextualized interpretations, confidentiality risks, and misleading conclusions.

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

• Reviewer selection is based on health-literacy, qualitative-research, healthcare, social-science, public-health, and methodological expertise.
• 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, participant protection, 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, transcripts, field notes, coding records, consent documentation, analytical files, or other supporting evidence where necessary.
3. Independent advice: seek health-literacy, qualitative-methodology, ethical, clinical, public-health, social-science, legal, or statistical expertise where appropriate.
4. Institutional coordination: contact institutions, research-integrity offices, funders, ethics committees, healthcare organizations, 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, fabricated interviews, invented quotations, falsified qualitative data, confidentiality violations, or other research misconduct may continue to be investigated even if an author requests withdrawal.

Authors, participants, healthcare professionals, institutions, community partners, and other stakeholders may raise concerns about editorial procedures, reviewer conduct, conflicts of interest, confidentiality, participant treatment, qualitative interpretation, 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, including health-literacy instruments, scales, questionnaires, interview frameworks, photographs, illustrations, screenshots, diagrams, or reproduced materials where required.
• Authors must respect participant rights in personal narratives, photographs, audio, video, and other identifiable materials.
• 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, interview transcripts, field notes, health data, consent records, allegations, 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.