Editorial policies

Autorship guidelines and contributor roles

Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) is used by Sílex journal to assist distinguish, identify, and make clear the thorough classification of each author’s many responsibilities in the preparation of their manuscripts. Thus, CRediT aids in reducing author conflicts and promoting transparency in academic involvement because it offers a detailed categorization of the many roles that each author performs.

The following are the 14 roles or collaboration criteria.

  1. Conceptualization. Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
  2. Data curation. Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
  3. Formal analysis. Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data.
  4. Funding acquisition. Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
  5. Investigation. Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
  6. Methodology. Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
  7. Project administration. Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
  8. Resources. Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools..
  9. Software. Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
  10. Supervision. Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
  11. Validation. Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
  12. Visualization. Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
  13. Writing - original draft. Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing in the initial draft (including substantive translation).
  14. Writing – review & editing. Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.

Following approval for final publication, the corresponding authorship roles in each case are listed at the end of the manuscript under the heading “Declaration of authorship contribution”, below the Bibliographic references.

Examples:

  • Pardo, J: conceptualization, methodology, writing – review & editing, supervision.
  • Mendoza, R: investigation, methodology, writing – original draft. 

Policy on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools

Sílex journal allows the limited and responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help with information organization, literature classification, and other related tasks. This is possible as long as there is a guarantee of critical and verifiable human intervention in the manuscript development process.

When using these tools, authors must include a separate document that clearly states how they were used in the manuscript. This document should be titled “Declaration of AI Use,” and it should include the name, version, and URL of the tool used, as well as how it was used, why it was used, and how human control over the final content was ensured.

The use of AI does not exempt authors from their responsibility for the manuscript’s content, which must be thoroughly reviewed and edited to ensure its accuracy and relevance. AI should not be used to create or alter research data or to replace the author’s main tasks, which include creating original content, reviewing the relevance of information, and editing text, tables, and graphics.

In addition, the AI tool must be properly cited in the references section using the citation format specified by the journal. For example:

OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT GPT-4o [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
Anthropic. (2024). Claude 3.5 Sonnet [Large language model]. https://www.claude.ai/

Research data policy 

Insofar as it pertains to the humanities and social sciences, Sílex journal advocates for open science and academic openness, acknowledging the significance of research data accessibility, availability, and preservation.

Research data refers to the materials such as data sets, transcripts, research instruments, codes, archival materials, images, or other relevant resources that support the results presented in an academic work.

Sílex advises authors to make the data supporting their research available through open access repositories whenever it is possible and ethically appropriate, and to explicitly include the link (URL or DOI) in their manuscript.

However, Sílex acknowledges that not all data in the humanities and social sciences may be made public for reasons related to ethics, law, confidentiality, privacy, copyright, or sensitivity. In such cases, authors should declare the limitations that are in place and, if relevant, outline the circumstances in which the data may be consulted.

Sílex encourages the use of reliable repositories that guarantee the preservation, citationality, and long-term access of research data in keeping with its commitment to ethical publishing practices.

Preprints policy 

Sílex journal accepts submissions of manuscripts that have already been published as preprints—preliminary versions of scholarly works deposited on open access servers—before undergoing a formal peer review process and without being published in an academic journal or in a work with an ISBN.

At the time of manuscript submission, authors are required to explicitly state whether a preprint exists and provide the corresponding link (URL or DOI). If this information is not provided, comments may be made throughout the editorial process.

Prior deposit as a preprint does not affect editorial decisions or the peer review process. If the article is accepted and published, authors are advised to update the preprint record with a reference to the final version published in the journal.