Following ethical guidelines is required in scientific publishing. Understand IEEE’s publishing guidelines and concepts to ensure ethical requirements are met. Learn about authorship, how to cite sources appropriately, plagiarism, how to report your data accurately, and the importance of publishing original research.
Who should be listed as an author on your scientific article? The IEEE definition of authorship will help you answer that question and clarify an author’s responsibilities.
IEEE considers individuals who meet all of the following criteria to be authors:
Contributors who do not meet all of the above criteria may be included in the Acknowledgment section of the article.
Source: IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual, Section 8.2.1.A.1.
If you are collaborating with other authors to publish an article, you will all need to agree on which author will be designated as the corresponding author. The corresponding author is the single point of contact between the authors and the publication where the article is submitted.
In addition to all of the authorship criteria described above, the corresponding author is also responsible for:
Tip: Select your article’s corresponding author before submitting to a publication. Co-authors remain responsible for work submitted, reviewed, and published under their names.
Source: IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual, Section 8.2.1.A.5.
IEEE supports the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) initiative and guidelines on an inclusive approach to author name changes.
Learn more about IEEE’s author name change policy.
You should always cite any sources used in your magazine article. Citation is required in several instances. Follow these guidelines.
Note that the same rules apply to your own previously published work. When in doubt, cite.
IEEE defines plagiarism as the use of another’s ideas, processes, results, or words without explicitly acknowledging the original author and source. Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable and is considered a serious breach of professional conduct, with potentially severe ethical and legal consequences. (IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual, Section 8.2.1.B.7.)
All IEEE journal, magazine, and conference articles are screened for plagiarism before publication in the IEEE Xplore® Digital Library.
Citing an irrelevant source for the purpose of artificially inflating citation metrics is considered a breach of ethics. Only cite relevant sources that legitimately contribute to your article according to the criteria outlined above.
Readers of your article rely on you to communicate your research findings fully and report your data accurately. Ensure you are showing the full picture by avoiding fabrication, falsification, and image manipulation during your research and when you are writing or revising your article.
Avoid:
¹The Office of Research Integrity, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
When submitting your article for publication to IEEE, it should: contain original research that has not been published before; and not be submitted to any other publication while you await a peer review decision.
IEEE recognizes that technical research is often published first as a conference article with preliminary findings. As those initial findings become fully developed, the conference article can evolve into a journal or magazine article which contains your more developed research and conclusions. IEEE supports this evolutionary publishing process provided that:
Source: IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual, Section 8.1.7.E.