Sage Journals Information

At Sage we promise:

• Expert support from your Publishing Editor on all aspects of managing your journal.
• Advice on the strategic development of your journal: we will help you attract and publish high quality content. Read Publishing quality content for more information and useful resources to help you attract and publish the best papers in your journal.
• Support and advice on developing your Editorial Board: as Editor, it is important for you to develop an Editorial Board that reflects a range of subject expertise in the field, is gender balanced and is geographically and ethnically diverse. We are very happy to provide guidance should you need it, and of course will be happy to implement changes to your Editorial Board to ensure that it is truly representative, and all members work as a team to help you manage and develop the journal.
• Support and guidance on matters of publication policy and ethics; advice on how to deal with suspected publication misconduct.

If you are new to the role of Editor, you may find the COPE Short guide to ethical editing for new editors useful, as well as their Core practices guidelines.

We ask our Editors to ensure their actions are aligned wherever possible with COPE guidelines and encourage you to discuss any queries or concerns with your Publishing Editor.

We ask our Editors to:

• Maintain quality, transparency and integrity in what is published: publish the best quality content possible for the journal, uphold the highest standards of peer review, and ensure that editorial decisions are taken following thorough assessment by suitable peers and revision where necessary. 
• Maintain and promote consistent ethical policies for their journals.
• Oversee and act to enforce those policies as needed in a fair and consistent manner.
• Judge each submission on its own merits and not exclude authors based on their previous publication history.
• Ensure the confidentiality of the review process.
• Uphold the integrity of the peer review and publishing process and not i) require authors to cite the journal as a condition of publication, ii) suggest unnecessary self-citation.
• Ensure that reviewer comments sent back to authors are fair, unbiased and constructive and do not contain discriminatory or other offensive language. Remember that reviews can be edited before being returned to authors.
• If you are handling a manuscript and decide to provide a review of that manuscript yourself, ensure this is done transparently, as per COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.
• Exercise the highest standards of personal integrity in their work as Editor of the journal, recognizing and planning for instances where they could have a competing interest or the appearance of a competing interest.
• Work with authors, reviewers, and Editorial Board members as necessary to ensure they are sufficiently advised regarding their journal’s ethics and publishing policies and that the journal’s stewardship on ethical matters is fair, unbiased and timely.
• Maintain an Editorial Board that reflects the various disciplines in the field and is international, gender balanced and ethnically diverse.

We ask authors publishing in Sage journals to:

• Read and abide by the journal’s manuscript submission guidelines. Please work with your Publishing Editor if you feel these are less than fully transparent, clear or accurate.
• Only submit papers that are original, their own work, and that have not been submitted concurrently to any other journal.
• Adhere to all research ethics guidelines of their discipline, particularly where human or animal subjects are involved, and include relevant declarations and statements confirming such. Details of what is required by your journal can be found in your submission guidelines.
• Ensure any real or apparent conflicting or competing interest is clearly stated on submission of their paper (this would include funding assistance).
• Ensure their data is true and not manipulated, that it is their own or that they have permission to use data reproduced in their paper.
• Where material is taken from other sources (including their own published writing) the source is clearly cited and that where appropriate permission is obtained.
• Ensure their work does not infringe on any rights of others, including privacy rights and intellectual property rights.
• Comply with the stated authorship criteria, including accurately representing the authorship of the paper, ensuring that all individuals credited as authors participated in the actual authorship of the work, that all who participated are credited and have given consent for publication, and that others are acknowledged appropriately.
• Contact the Editor regarding any changes in authorship that may be required either before or after publication. Please let your Publishing Editor know of any disputes around authorship. Details of our process for handing these can be found in the section on authorship disputes below.
• Contact the Editor to identify and correct any material errors upon discovery, whether prior or subsequent to publication of their work. If an author contacts you about making changes to their published article, please inform your Publishing Editor. More information on Sage’s policy in terms of correcting the academic record can be found in the section on Publication ethics and practices below.

Sage requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Contributor License for all journal articles we publish. The corresponding author is asked to warrant that they are authorized to sign on behalf of themselves and, in the case of multi-authored papers, on behalf of all other authors. Sage’s Journal Contributor License is a license agreement under which the author retains copyright in the work but grants Sage the sole and exclusive right and license to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than Sage. In this case copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society. The Contributor License  includes details of what the author is permitted to do with their article; this information can also be found within the copyright and permissions pages. Please note that an article cannot be published in the journal without a Contributor License. If we do not have the signed Contributor License, we will not proceed to publication. 

We ask reviewers to:

• Provide their expert, objective assessment of the manuscript, and provide fair, unbiased, and constructive comments where possible. 
• Return their referee report in the format requested and in a timely manner.
• Take responsibility for declaring any conflicts of interest that could affect the impartiality of their reviewing and decline to review where appropriate. If your journal uses ScholarOne Manuscripts, this is typically captured as part of the invitation to review.
• Maintain the confidentiality of the peer review process.
• Abide by COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers

Sage will not publish any article without receipt of an accompanying approved and signed Contributor License prior to the publication deadline.

It is our standard policy to not publish material in our journals that has been previously published elsewhere, except in translation.

We will not generally republish material because: i) publishing original high quality content is important to our readers, ii) in an environment where most material is available electronically, previously published material tends to already be available so the need for it to be made 'more accessible' diminishes and iii) citation/attribution considerations: republication of material means that the same article will exist with multiple bibliographic records, which can cause confusion and dilute citations.

There are certain circumstances where material that has been publicly distributed may be considered for publication – see our page on Prior publication for guidance.

Secondary publication, for example of government or organizational guidelines, may be acceptable if there is a compelling reason to make the article available to your journal’s audience.

Please see the ICMJE Recommendations on Overlapping Publications for more guidance and information. If your journal is co-publishing an article, Sage can prepare a special license agreement to be signed by the relevant parties.

Broadly, the ways in which ethics could be breached fall under the following categories:

• Plagiarism: presenting another person’s ideas or materials as if they were his or her own, or without proper acknowledgement or attribution
• Copyright infringement: presenting another person’s original work of authorship – their expression of ideas – as if it were his or her own, without proper acknowledgement or attribution.
• Duplicate (or redundant) publication: an author copies and re-publishes their own work without reference to previous publication.
• Data fabrication/falsification: either making up results or altering results of experiments.
• Inappropriate attribution of authorship, which may lead to disputes (including individuals who have not contributed to an article or excluding authors who have contributed, lack of acknowledgment of guest or ghost authorship).
• Misconduct within the publication process (for example authors submitting manuscripts under fraudulent names or with fraudulent affiliations or reviewer misconduct during the peer review process).

We ask authors as part of the submission process to warrant that they are submitting their original work, that they hold the rights in the work, and that they have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by them. If your ScholarOne system includes iThenticate, you can use this to check the submission against papers published in journals using CrossRef (all major publishers use this reference-linking service). If you need help with using iThenticate please speak to your Publishing Editor.

Copying data or figures also falls under plagiarism but is harder to detect.

We also ask authors to warrant that they are submitting the work for first publication in the journal, that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere, and has not already been published elsewhere in the same or different languages. If material has been previously published it is not generally acceptable for publication in a Sage journal. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication, please see the Prior publication page for examples.

Articles using previously published data, images or results should clearly identify and give full reference to the original publication.

We set out our policy on what constitutes authorship on the Editorial policies pages. All journals must also include an authorship policy within their submission guidelines. We recommend that all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section.

Sometimes disputes around who should be included or excluded as authors can arise either during the submission process or after publication. We recommended considering the following to help manage authorship disputes:

• If your journal uses ScholarOne Manuscripts, the system can be set up so that all listed authors are copied in on correspondence.
• Require authors to supply statements outlining their specific contribution (e.g. X designed the study, Y collected data, X and Y wrote the paper and gave final approval for publication).
• Ask authors to supply ORCID IDs to remove ambiguity around their identity.
• Use Sage’s Authorship Change Request Form (ask your Publishing Editor or Peer Review Associate) to document any amendments to the author list.

If you would like to consider any of these initiatives for your journal, please talk to your Publishing Editor. 

You may also find COPE’s guidelines useful: How to handle authorship disputes: a guide for new researchers 

In recent years a number of journal publishers, including Sage, have been affected by attempts to defraud and circumvent the peer review system, specifically by abusing the preferred or recommended reviewer functionality. Whilst such instances relate to a very small proportion of the scholarly research system, the potential impact on a journal’s reputation is significant. If your journal still uses recommended reviewers, please be alert to potential abuse by following the steps described in the above section on managing the peer review process.

If you suspect or are made aware of any misconduct within the publication process, talk to your Publishing Editor and check the relevant COPE flowchart.

Attempts to manipulate Journal Impact Factors by deliberately increasing the number of self-citations are unethical. Some level of self-citation is to be expected but editors or reviewers should under no circumstances ask authors to cite their journal in their submitted paper unless it is relevant to the work being considered and will be useful to the journal’s readers. Please be aware that Clarivate measures levels of self-citations and will exclude journals from their databases if they consider these levels to be excessive. We recommend reviewing Clarivate's journal selection process, which includes some information on self-citation.

In the same way, citation ‘stacking’ by ‘citation cartels’ (i.e. a group of editors or board members agreeing to add citations to each other’s journals) is unacceptable and should not be tolerated.

At Sage, we recognize and champion new technology that facilitates conducting, writing and disseminating research. A multitude of tools and technology have been developed in recent years that can increase productivity and aid those perhaps writing in English as a second or third language.

We also recognize that the increasingly widespread use of generative AI/ LLMs blurs the lines between human generated and machine generated text, calling into question some of our usual assumptions and policies on authorship. This technology may be used by bad actors to create fabricated submissions and attempt to subvert the peer-review process for commercial gain. The currently available language models are not fully objective or factual. Authors using generative AI to write their research must make every effort to ensure that the output is factually correct, and the references provided reflect the claims made.

We’ve put together this guide for Editors around the use of LLMs and AI in scholarly publishing. As technology improves and we adapt to using these tools, we will likely develop this guidance further. Further resources that might be useful are listed at the bottom of the page. You could also have a look at our Sage Campus course, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

If you have any questions or concerns about AI tools/LLMs do contact your Sage Editor in the first instance. 

Our policy on the use of LLMs in submissions can be found on our Publishing Policies pages: Artificial Intelligence policy 

Potential biases in generative AI 

• The information being fed to the tool is curated by a human presence
• Some of these AI tools will be limited to using freely available resources and therefore based on a partial selection of the literature
• AI tools and LLMs are trained on sources that contain systemic biases and are likely to inadvertently replicate those biases in their outputs
• These tools may curate responses from multiple sources available on the internet which reduces accuracy and increases the chance of spurious information

Potentially false or misleading information and references

LLMs, like ChatGPT, have been seen to falsify references or insert incorrect ones within their essays or summaries. We have seen several instances where citations to publications that do not exist were provided by ChatGPT.

In addition, AI tools or LLMs may generate outputs that appear or sound plausible but cannot be validated or cannot be justified by its source data. This phenomenon, referred to as Hallucinations, can occur either directly from the source data or from the way the model is trained. Frequently occurring hallucinations are a considerable problem with this technology.

Image, data, and text fabrication in submissions

LLMs may be exploited by suspicious or bad actors to generate fabricated text, or text put together from various sources on the internet. While this may be appropriate for summarizing complex information for further study, it remains inappropriate for primary research articles that must contain critical new information, either with a new perspective or containing novel data. LLMs in primary research may only be detected using AI detection tools, but these tools cannot currently detect falsified references in text.

In addition, there are growing concerns that these tools may be used to generate images that are reported as primary data but were generated using AI. Before incorporating sources into your scholarly work, apply the CRAAP test to your responses to avoid sending out misinformation or spreading bias.

Use of LLMs for editors

The use of AI or LLMs for Editorial work presents confidentiality and copyright issues. As the tool or model will learn from what it receives over time and may use it to provide outputs to others, we ask Editors not to use these tools to triage manuscripts or create summaries. You should also not use these tools to summarize reviews and write decision letters due to concerns around confidentiality and copyright.
You could use ChatGPT or other AI based tools to look for reviewers in the subject area. Due to concerns around spurious text generation, we ask that you verify their identity before inviting them to review a submission. Reviewer verification should typically involve checking their publication record and/or institutional profiles using a basic google/internet search.

Use of LLMs for reviewers

While LLMs can create a critical summary that would look like a review report, it is unlikely to be able to capture the reviewer’s experience as a researcher in the field, any local or contextual nuances of the study or indeed what impact the study may have on various populations. We ask that Editors ensure the reviewers invited are aware of the confidentiality issues presented by generating a review report using language models or generative AI. If an Editor is concerned about a review report that appears to be generated by ChatGPT or another tool, they should flag this to Sage for advice.

Vetted experts as reviewers

It continues to be important to use vetted reviewers who are experts in the field. Using reviewers who do not have specific expertise or those who cannot be verified increases the risk of machine written content to pass peer-review and masquerade as genuine human writing.

Reading the submission

Careful reading of text is crucial to understand if a submission was written by generative AI. As Editors, we rely on your subject level expertise to discern whether an article makes sense at the sentence level but also at the overall document level. If a sentence or paragraph does not make sense, or appears to be machine generated, please query it with authors, or raise it with Sage for advice. We recommend looking out for usual ChatGPT prompts such as “Regenerate response” in the text.

Qualitative indicators:

1. Complexity of paragraph structure- humans are likely to have more sentences per paragraph in academic writing 
2. Diversity in sentence structures, length- humans are likely to have more words per paragraph and increased variability in length of consecutive sentences. For example, a short sentence followed by a very long sentence. 
3. Usage of punctuation unique to human academic writing- brackets, semi colons and colons 
4. Usage of equivocal words like “Although” or “However” or “but” and “because” are more commonly associated with human writing.

This is a constantly evolving landscape as LLMs are evolving fast and work into developing appropriate detection methods has been perceived as an arms race. We have identified some free tools that exist outside our submission system which will allow us to deepen our understanding of the AI generated content in our submissions and determine whether any currently available tools would help detection. We are undertaking a pilot on some journals to understand which tools may be useful for detection.  

NB: many of the key differentiating traits between text generated by humans and AI-generated text—including the use of colloquial and emotional language—are not traits that academic scientists typically display in formal writing, so any differences or anomalies in this respect would not necessarily translate to academic writing.

• WAME guidance on Chatbots, Generative AI and Scholarly Manuscripts
• COPE guidance and news on Artificial Intelligence
• ICMJE guidance on Artificial intelligence assisted technology