Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers

Peer reviewers must follow these ethical guidelines when reviewing for JECCE articles:

1. Reviewers must give unbiased consideration to each manuscript submitted. They should judge each on its merits, without regard to race, religion, nationality, gender, seniority, or institutional affiliation of the author(s).
2. Reviewers must declare any conflict of interest before agreeing to review a manuscript. This includes any relationship with the author(s) that may bias their review.
3. Reviewers must keep the peer review process confidential. They must not share information or correspondence about a manuscript with anyone outside of the peer review process without the explicit permission of the editor.
4. They must not enter unpublished manuscript files, images or information into databases or tools that do not guarantee confidentiality, are accessible by the public and/or may store or use this information for their own purposes (for example, generative AI tools like ChatGPT).
5. Reviewers must prepare their report by themselves. They must also not impersonate others during the review process.
6. Reviewers must not use artificial intelligence tools to generate manuscript review reports including LLM based tools like ChatGPT.
7. Reviewers should provide a constructive, comprehensive, evidenced, and appropriately substantial peer review report. Reviewers are responsible for ensuring any references included within their report are accurate and verifiable.
8. Reviewers must avoid making statements in their report which might be interpreted as questioning any person’s reputation.
9. Reviewers should make all reasonable effort to submit their report and recommendation on time. They should inform the editor if this is not possible.
10. Reviewers should call to the journal editor’s attention any significant similarity between the manuscript under consideration and any published paper or submitted manuscripts of which they are aware.