Suspected breaches of our publication ethics policies, either before and after publication, as well as concerns about research ethics, should be reported to the journal. Claimants will be kept anonymous if requested.

As soon as we get information about the misconduct, our editors will start a thorough investigation. The authors may be asked to provide the underlying data, images, and other supplementary materials. The journal will consult editors, and contact institutions or employers to ask for an investigation.

If an article is found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines of the journal such as duplicate submission, fraudulent data, plagiarism, citation manipulation, false claim of authorship, etc. the article will be rejected by the journal.

In case the article is accepted and under the ‘Online first’ stage the journal will remove the article from the website and an appropriate note for article withdrawal will be posted. No response from the authors to journal communication after review and provisional acceptance is also considered as withdrawal of the article. If it is a published article the same will be retracted immediately following the COPE Retraction Guidelines.

The journal follows COPE flow charts (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts) for handling the misconduct.

In addition to that we may take the following actions based on the severity of misconduct;

• Not allowing submission for 1–3 years.
• A prohibition from acting as an editor or reviewer.
• Reporting the misconduct to the author's institutions, employers, and, their funding agencies.

However, the minor unintentional errors by the authors may be corrected by a corrigendum and errors by the publisher by an erratum.