Editorial policies

Please read these policies in full before submitting your article, to ensure you’ve correctly followed all the requirements.

Affiliations

You and your co-authors must list all relevant affiliations to attribute where the research or scholarly work was approved and/or supported and/or conducted.

• For non-research articles, you must list your current institutional affiliation.
• If you have moved to a different institution before the article has been published, you should list the affiliation where the work was conducted, and include a note to state your current affiliation.
• If you do not have a current relevant institutional affiliation you should state your independent status.

Appeals and complaints

The Primary Education Journal follows Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on appeals to journal editor decisions and complaints about a journal’s editorial management of the peer review process.

We welcome genuine appeals to editor decisions. However, you will need to provide strong evidence or new data/information in response to the editor’s and reviewers’ comments.

Where you, as an author, wish to comment on aspects of the journal’s editorial management please contact us.

Authorship

Listing authors’ names on an article is an important mechanism to give credit to those who have significantly contributed to the work. It also ensures transparency for those who are responsible for the integrity of the content.

Authors listed on an article must meet all of the following criteria:

• Made a significant contribution to the work reported, whether that’s in the conception, study design, execution, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation, or in all these areas.
• Have drafted or written, or substantially revised or critically reviewed the article.
• Have agreed on the journal to which the article will be submitted.
• Reviewed and agreed on all versions of the article before submission, during revision, the final version accepted for publication, and any significant changes introduced at the proofing stage.
• Agree to take responsibility and be accountable for the contents of the article and to share responsibility to resolve any questions raised about the accuracy or integrity of the published work.

It is the collective responsibility of all the individuals who have conducted the work to determine who should be listed as authors, and the order in which authors should be listed.

The journal editor will not decide on order of authorship and cannot arbitrate authorship disputes. Where unresolved disputes between the authors arise, the institution(s) where the work was performed will be asked to investigate.

Please read our guide to defining authorship. It includes details on:

• Corresponding authors
• Changes in authorship
• Assistance from scientific, medical, technical writers or translators
• Acknowledging use of AI 
• Assistance with experiments and data analysis
• Acknowledgments
• Author name change policy

Citations

Research and non-research articles must cite relevant, timely, and verified literature (peer-reviewed, where appropriate) to support any claims made in the article.

You must avoid excessive and inappropriate self-citation or prearrangements among author groups to inappropriately cite each other’s work, as this can be considered a form of misconduct called citation manipulation. Read the COPE guidance on citation manipulation.

If you’re the author of a non-research article (e.g. a Review or Opinion) you should ensure the references you cite are relevant and provide a fair and balanced overview of the current state of research or scholarly work on the topic. Your references should not be unfairly biased towards a particular research group, organization or journal.

If you are unsure about whether to cite a source you should contact the journal editorial office for advice.

Competing interests

You and all of your co-authors must declare any competing interests relevant to, or which can be perceived to be relevant to the article.

• A competing interest can occur where you (or your employer, sponsor or family/friends) have a financial, commercial, legal, or professional relationship with other organizations, or with the people working with them which could influence the research or interpretation of the results.
• Competing interests can be financial or non-financial in nature. To ensure transparency, you must also declare any associations which can be perceived by others as a competing interest.

Please read our guide to competing interests. This includes examples of financial and non-financial competing interests as well as information about the sponsorship of clinical trials.

Corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions

Sometimes after an article has been published it may be necessary to make a change to the Version of Record (VoR). This will be done after careful consideration by the Editor who is also supported by The Primary Education Journal editor to ensure any necessary changes are done in accordance with guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Any necessary changes will be accompanied with a post-publication notice which will be permanently linked to the original article. This can be in the form of a Correction notice, an Expression of Concern, a Retraction and in rare circumstances a Removal. The purpose of this mechanism of making changes which are permanent and transparent is to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record.

Data availability and deposition

Are you submitting your paper to The Primary Education Journal, and is there a data set associated with your work? The Primary Education Journa has policy on data sharing which state how data associated with your article should be shared. The guide to understanding our data sharing policy will help you get to grips with the details and the steps you’ll need to take as an author.

A data repository also is a storage space for researchers to deposit data sets associated with their research. And if you’re an author seeking to comply with journal's data sharing policy, you’ll need to identify a suitable repository for your data.

Read our guide to choosing a data repository which includes some generalist repositories you may wish to consider.

Also, to enable full assessment of submissions, you must make available on request to Editors and/or reviewers any custom computer codes, software tools, or algorithms which have been used to generate the results and conclusions that are reported in your manuscript.

Designations of territories

The Primary Education Journal respects its authors’ decisions regarding the designations of territories in its published material.

The Primary Education Journal's policy is to take a neutral stance in relation to territorial disputes or jurisdictional claims in its published content, including in maps and institutional affiliations.

Editor Code of Conduct

The Primary Education Journal provides a home for validated, trusted research from the world’s brightest and best minds. The editor of the journal plays a vital role in advancing knowledge within fields of research. They do this by:

• Maintaining and improving the quality of work the journal publishes and the integrity of its peer review process.
• Supporting the journal’s authors and reviewers.
• Maintaining and improving the journal’s reputation.

Funding

The Primary Education Journal requires authors to declare all sources of financial support that helped to cover the expenses associated with the research reported in their article. Examples of these funding sources include:

• Internal funds, grants, and other types of financial support, such as those provided by the authors’ institutions, employers or the organizations authors are affiliated with.
• External funds, such as those obtained from charities/non-profit organizations, private foundations, for-profit companies (e.g. technological or pharmaceutical companies), think tanks, political advocacy groups, trade associations, research associations, and government bodies.

The funding declaration enables authors to attribute credit to funders and facilitates transparency, especially where the funder may have additional roles or may have contributed to the research study. These contributions would also need to be defined in more detail within the competing interests declaration.

Examples of funding support authors are expected to declare include (but are not limited to):

• Funding used to cover the expense associated with performing the research (e.g. costs of equipment or reagents used in the study) and/or analysis of the results.
• Funding used for outsourced services or external assistance with experiments, data collation and/or data analysis reported in the article. Our policies on authorship and acknowledging external support can be found here.
• Additional funding used to pay for language editing services, translators, and scientific, medical or technical writers. Our policies on authorship and acknowledging support can be found here.
• Funding for travel necessary to the research project (e.g. travel to do fieldwork or archival research) .

Authors are expected to declare only the acquired funds and grants that are directly relevant to the work reported in their article. If no funding was obtained for the reported work, authors are also encouraged to declare that no funding was obtained. This ensures transparency and avoids concerns being raised about undeclared funding support. 

Any funding declaration must include the full name(s) of the funding body, the grant number(s), and ideally, the name of the person/group to whom this grant was awarded. As stated above, if the funder also played an active role in the research study, such as the data acquisition or analysis, this should be clearly stated in the competing interests declaration.

Authors must be prepared to provide funding documentation and additional information to the journal office if requested (including, where relevant, information on funding used toward submission and publication fees). Please note that failure to disclose funding may, in some cases, be considered as misconduct and may result in corrective action to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record. Correction or retraction notices (as appropriate) may need to be issued on published articles where inaccuracies or key missing information in the funding statement are identified.

Harassment

The Primary Education Journal will not tolerate any kind of harassment of our authors, editors, reviewers, staff, or vendors.

We expect to work in an environment of mutual respect to deal with any cases of harassment.

Advice for researchers experiencing harassment: As a researcher, you should expect your work to be scrutinized by the public, policy makers, and campaigners. However, some researchers working on high-profile subjects that attract controversy have also found themselves targeted with online harassment.

Images and figures

You should only use images and figures in your article if they are relevant and valuable to the work reported. Please refrain from adding content of this type which is purely illustrative and does not add value to the scholarly work.

As a warranty in the Journal Author Publishing Agreement you make with us, you must obtain the necessary written permission to include material in your article that is owned and held in copyright by a third party, including – but not limited to – any proprietary text, illustration, table, or other material, including data, audio, video, film stills, screenshots, musical notation, and any supplemental material.

Content (e.g. photographs, video or audio recordings, 3D models, illustrations, etc) which can reveal the identity of patients, study participants or study subjects can only be included if they (or parents/guardians if they are underage or considered unable to provide informed consent, or their next of kin if participants are deceased) have provided consent to publish.

If any of this type of content has been obtained from communities where additional permissions are required (e.g. an Elder or community leader in an indigenous community), or from a protected source (e.g. museum collections), then authors must obtain the required permissions for use prior to submission of the manuscript.

Misconduct

The Primary Education Journal takes all forms of misconduct seriously and will take all necessary action, in accordance with COPE guidelines, to protect the integrity of the scholarly record.

Examples of misconduct include (but are not limited to):

• Affiliation misrepresentation
• Breaches in copyright/use of third-party material without appropriate permissions
• Citation manipulation
• Duplicate submission/publication
• Ethics dumping
• Image or data manipulation/fabrication
• Peer review manipulation
• Plagiarism
• Text-recycling/self-plagiarism
• Undisclosed competing interests
• Unethical research

Peer review

Articles published in The Primary Education Journal undergo thorough peer review and The Primary Education Journal endorses COPE guidelines for reviewers. Our guide to understanding peer review outlines the journal's peer review model.

A minimum of two independent reviewers is normally required for every research article. The details of the comments as well as the overall recommendations by peer reviewers will be considered by the Editor when making a decision, but ultimate responsibility for acceptance or rejection lies with the Editor.

In accordance with COPE recommendations on ethical editing for new Editors, Editors will assign any submissions they cannot handle (e.g. if they are the author of an article submitted to their own journal) to a member of the Editorial Board or a guest editor.

It is a requirement to maintain confidentiality and integrity of the peer review and editorial decision-making process at all stages, complying with data protection regulations (including KVK and GDPR). The invited reviewer should declare any competing interest before submitting their report to the journal. If they wish to involve a colleague as a co-reviewer for an article, they should ask the journal editorial office before sharing the manuscript and include their names, affiliation and any relevant competing interests in the comments for Editors when they return their report.

In the process of investigating an ethical query, the submitted manuscript, author, reviewer, and any other person (including whistleblowers) involved will be treated in confidence. During an investigation it may be necessary for the Editor to share information with third parties, such as the ethics committee and/or the authors’ institution.

Plagiarism

For The Primary Education Journal, this applies to data, images, words or ideas taken from any materials in electronic or print formats without sufficient attribution. The use of any such material either directly or indirectly should be properly acknowledged in all instances. You should always cite your source.

Read our plagiarism page and guidance for authors to find out what plagiarism is (and isn’t) and how you can avoid it.

Preprints, preprint servers, and early reporting of scholarly work

We support the need for authors to share early versions of their work before peer review publication. There are also authors can share the final Version of Record of their published article.

A preprint, also known as the Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM), is your article before you have submitted it to a journal for peer review. Preprint servers are online repositories which enable you to post this early version of your research paper online.

If you upload your AOM to a non-commercial preprint server, you can subsequently submit the manuscript to The Primary Education Journal. We do not consider posting on a preprint server to be duplicate publication and this will not jeopardize consideration for publication.

If you’ve posted your AOM to a preprint server, we ask that, upon acceptance, you acknowledge that the article has been accepted for publication as follows:

“This article has been accepted for publication in The Primary Education Journal.”

After publication please update your preprint, adding the following text to encourage others to read and cite the final published version of your article (the “Version of Record”):

“This is an original manuscript of an article published by The Primary Education Journal on [date of publication], available online: https://doi.org/[Article DOI].”

Find out more about preprints

Research ethics and consent

All research published in The Primary Education Journal must have been conducted according to international and local guidelines ensuring ethically conducted research.

Please read our research ethics guide for researchers. This guide includes detailed information about the research ethics.

Standards of reporting

Research should be communicated in a way that supports verification and reproducibility, and as such we encourage authors to provide comprehensive descriptions of their research rationale, protocol, methodology, and analysis.

Use of third-party material

You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. These materials may include – but are not limited to – text, illustration, photographs, tables, data, audio, video, film stills, screenshots, or musical notation.

The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) in your research

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides a host of exciting opportunities for researchers to speed up and expand their work. Taylor & Francis supports researchers who want to use AI, in a responsible way, for new forms of content creation and analysis. Examples of its potential uses in research include:

• Idea generation and exploration
• Interactive online search
• Literature classification
• Coding assistance

Artificial intelligence is still relatively new and additional applications for research are continually being developed. This means that guidelines for the use of AI in research are still evolving too. Please bookmark our AI policy to keep up to date with the latest guidance.

Key principles to be aware of when using AI in any part of the research process include:

• AI technologies should always be used with human oversight and transparency.
• You must ensure any tools you intend to use respect high standards of data security, confidentiality, and copyright protection.
• You must receive permission from copyright holders prior to using copyrighted material in an AI tool. This applies for example when working on literature reviews and summaries.
• Some potential uses of AI in research are considered unethical. For example, generative AI tools should not be used in ways that replace core researcher and author responsibilities.
• You must also acknowledge the use of AI in any papers you write based on that research. Read our authorship guidance for more details.

Above all, however you use AI, it remains your responsibility to make sure that your work meets the highest standards in your field of research.