Ethical and Publication Malpractice Statement

Summary of our ethical statement

Author responsibilities

Our goal is to provide you with a professional and courteous experience at each stage of the review and publication process. There are also some responsibilities that sit with you as the author. Our expectation is that you will:

• Respond swiftly to any queries during the publication process.
• Be accountable for all aspects of your work. This includes investigating and resolving any questions about accuracy or research integrity.
• Treat communications between you and the journal editor as confidential until an editorial decision has been made.
• Read about our research ethics for authorship. These state that you must:
  • Include anyone who has made a substantial and meaningful contribution to the submission (anyone else involved in the paper should be listed in the acknowledgements).
  • Exclude anyone who hasn’t contributed to the paper, or who has chosen not to be associated with the research.
• If your article involves human participants, you must ensure you have considered whether or not you require ethical approval for your research, and include this information as part of your submission.

For someone to be considered an author, they must have:

• Made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Given final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Informed consent

If there is a human subject involved in your research, you must obtain clearance from your institutional ethics board and confirm recognised standards (for example the Declaration of Helsinki) have been followed to minimise harm to the individuals taking part.

If your article includes an image of someone’s face, or anything else that might identify them, you must provide proof of informed consent via a completed consent to publish form.

Citation manipulation

Citations and referencing are important when writing any research, however, researchers should be mindful of the following behaviours:

• Self-citation: Authors should not indulge in excessive self-citations of their own previously published works. Included citations must be relevant, add value to the article, and should not be included just to increase the citation score of that author. If discussing methodologies or literature reviews, authors should keep their self-citations to a minimum.
• Coercive citation: During the peer-review process, you may be referred to papers the reviewer believes can further develop and improve your ideas. While there may be legitimate reasons to reference other publications, 'coercive citation' is unethical (this is where a reference is included as a condition of acceptance or without academic justification). We are an advocate of both author freedom and editorial independence. If you feel you have been pressured to include a particular reference in your article, or that an editor is unclear on best ethical practice, please contact our Editor-in-Chief.
• Citation pushing: 'Citation pushing' is where an author includes superfluous or irrelevant references with the intention of boosting another specific individual’s citation score; this often occurs amongst groups of individuals who aim to boost each other’s citation scores. This kind of behaviour is monitored across all of our publications.

Defamation/libel

You are required to obtain written proof of consent for studies about named organisations or people before you submit your work. If inaccurate, unsubstantiated or emotive statements are made about organisations or people in a submission, we may ask you to change the text, or reject the work prior to publication.

Critiques and reviews of products and services are acceptable, but comments must be constructive and not malicious. If statements made in work published by Budapest Management Review are found to be defamatory, a retraction notice will be published. In some cases, and when legally required, the paper will be withdrawn from the online version of the journal. We advise all authors of case studies to inform the subject (person or organisation) and to seek their consent. If we think the study is potentially libellous or contains sensitive information, we will require written proof of consent before placing the paper in the production process.

Plagiarism

The content you submit to a publisher should be based on your own research and expressed in your own words. If it isn’t, that could be considered plagiarism. Our editors have access to the plagiarism detection service Urkund, which compares submissions against a database of millions of works from multiple scholarly publishers. This, combined with our knowledgeable reviewers and editors, means it’s increasingly hard for plagiarised work to go unnoticed. There are various forms plagiarism can take.

• Verbatim copying: An exact copy of, or a significant passage or section of text taken from, another person's work without acknowledgement, references or use of quotation marks.
• Paraphrasing: More than one sentence within a paragraph or section of text has been changed, or sentences have been rearranged, without appropriate attribution. Significant improper paraphrasing without appropriate attribution is treated seriously as verbatim copying.
• Re-using parts of a work without attribution: For example, using a figure, table or paragraph without acknowledgement, references or the use of quotation marks. It is your responsibility as the author to obtain the necessary permissions from the copyright holder.
• Self-plagiarism or text recycling: You are expected to submit original content to Budapest Management Review. Research should only be repeated if it leads to different or new conclusions, or you want to compare it with new data. If any element of your latest submission has been published previously, you must ensure that the original work is fully referenced and make this clear to the editor or publisher at the point of submission.

Fabricated data

To fabricate or manipulate data is fundamentally wrong and a breach of research integrity. We may review data or request the original data files. If there is reason to suspect that the data is not plausible, we reserve the right to reject that paper, and to notify your institution, as appropriate.

Redundant publication

Also known as dual publication. Any work you submit to us must be original and previously unpublished. It is unacceptable academic practice to submit to more than one journal at the same time – you are expected to wait until receiving a decision from one journal before submitting to the next.

Figure or image manipulation

Image manipulation falls into two categories:

1. Inappropriate manipulation: the adjustment of an image or figure, which violates established research guidelines, but does not impact the interpretation of the data shown.
2. Fraudulent manipulation: the deliberate adjustment or manipulation of an image or figure to affect the interpretation of the data.

Manipulation may include the addition or removal of elements from a figure, or adjustments to image formatting designed to obscure or highlight a particular result.

The use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies

This policy has been prompted by the fact, that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or Large Language Models in research publications is growing rapidly. Vezetéstudomány / Budapest Management Review will monitor developments and adapt or refine this policy as appropriate.

Vezetéstudomány / Budapest Management Review joins organisations, such as COPE, to state that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper. AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements. Authors are accountable for the originality, validity, and integrity of the content of their submissions.

Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must do so responsibly and in accordance with all our editorial policies, and they must be transparent in disclosing this fact. If authors used generative AI or AI-assisted technology, they should include the following statement directly before the references at the end of the manuscript:

“During the preparation of this work the author(s) used [NAME TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the publication.”

In case authors used AI tools as part of their research methodology, they should also provide the relevant details in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper, describing how the AI tool was used and which tool was used.

Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of copyright or publication ethics.

Editor responsibilities

Our editors and employees work hard to ensure the content we publish is ethically sound. To help us achieve that goal, we closely follow the advice laid out in the guidelines and flowcharts on the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) website.

Fair play and editorial independence

Editors evaluate submitted manuscripts exclusively on the basis of their academic merit (importance, originality, study’s validity, clarity) and its relevance to the journal’s scope, without regard to the authors’ race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, citizenship, religious belief, political philosophy or institutional affiliation. Decisions to edit and publish are not determined by the policies of governments or any other agencies outside of the journal itself. The Editor-in-Chief has full authority over the entire editorial content of the journal and the timing of publication of that content. 

Confidentiality

Editors and editorial staff will not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Disclosure

Editors and editorial board members will not use unpublished information disclosed in a submitted manuscript for their own research purposes without the authors’ explicit written consent. Privileged information or ideas obtained by editors as a result of handling the manuscript will be kept confidential and not used for their personal advantage.

 

Reviewer responsibilities

Promptness

Any invited referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should immediately notify the editors and decline the invitation to review so that alternative reviewers can be contacted.

Confidentiality

Any manuscripts received for review are confidential documents and must be treated as such; they must not be shown to or discussed with others except if authorized by the Editor-in-Chief (who would only do so under exceptional and specific circumstances). This applies also to invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.

Standards of objectivity

Reviews should be conducted objectively and observations formulated clearly with supporting arguments so that authors can use them for improving the manuscript. Personal criticism of the authors is inappropriate.

Acknowledgement of sources

Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that is an observation, derivation or argument that has been reported in previous publications should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also notify the editors of any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other manuscript (published or unpublished) of which they have personal knowledge.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Any invited referee who has conflicts of interest resulting from a competitive, close collaborative, or other close relationships with any of the authors, companies or institutions connected to the manuscript and the work described therein should immediately notify the editors to declare their conflicts of interest and decline the invitation to review so that alternative reviewers can be contacted.

Unpublished material disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the authors. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for the reviewer’s personal advantage. This applies also to invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.