Publication ethics and malpractice statement

All authors must declare they have read and agreed to the content of the submitted manuscript. Manuscripts may be rejected by the editorial office if it is felt that the work was not carried out within an ethical framework.

Competing interests

Authors must declare all potential competing interests involving people or organizations that might reasonably be perceived as relevant. Examples of competing interests include but are not limited to financial, professional and personal interests such as:

1.       Research grants (from any source, restricted or unrestricted)

2.       Relationships (paid or unpaid) with organizations and funding bodies including nongovernmental organizations, research institutions or charities

3.       Membership of lobbying or advocacy organizations

4.       Personal relationships (i.e. friend, spouse, family member, current or previous mentor, adversary) with individuals involved in the submission or evaluation of a paper, such as authors, reviewers, editors, or members of the editorial board of CJSSBE journal

5.       Personal convictions (political, religious, ideological, or other) related to a paper's topic that may interfere with an unbiased publication process (at the stage of authorship, peer review, editorial decision making or publication)

Plagiarism

Plagiarism in any form constitutes a serious violation of the most basic principles of scholarship and cannot be tolerated. Examples of plagiarism include:

1.       Word-for-word copying of portions of another's writing without enclosing the copied passage in quotation marks and acknowledging the source in the appropriate scholarly convention.

2.       The use of a particularly unique term or concept that one has come across in reading without acknowledging the author or source.

3.       The paraphrasing or abbreviated restatement of someone else's ideas without acknowledging that another person's text has been the basis for the paraphrasing.

4.       False citation: material should not be attributed to a source from which it has not been obtained.

5.       False data: data that has been fabricated or altered in a laboratory or experiment, although not literally plagiarism, this is clearly a form of academic fraud.

6.       Unacknowledged multiple submission of a paper for several purposes without prior approval from the parties involved.

7.       Unacknowledged multiple authors or collaboration: the contributions of each author or collaborator should be made clear.

Self-plagiarism/double submission: the submission of the same or a very similar paper to two or more publications at the same time.