Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
The ethics statements for the Media Researcher (Médiakutató) are based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors available at: http://publicationethics.org/.
Editor Responsibilities
1. Accountability and publication decisions
The co-chief-editors are responsible for deciding which papers are accepted or rejected for publication and for every published article in the journal. In making these decisions, the editors may base their decision on the values of the journal’s editorial board and on the expert reviewers' suggestions. If necessary, they seek and take counsel with external editors and further reviewers. The editors will be constrained by legal requirements regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The editors protect the integrity of the publication by publishing corrections, clarifications and retractions when needed.
2. Fairness and equality
The editors and reviewers evaluate manuscripts solely for their intellectual content equally and without bias, excluding factors that are not affecting the scientific quality of the manuscript.
3. Confidentiality
The editor and the editorial board members will not disclose any information about the submitted manuscript as well as all supplementary data to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers and other editorial advisers as appropriate. With the above exceptions they will not disclose any information about the submitted manuscript to any third parties.
4. Disclosure and conflict of interest
The editors will not disclose any unpublished material submitted to the Media Researcher neither use it for their own research without the express written consent of the author. The editors seek to ensure a fair, non-biased peer review process. Conflict of interest with a reviewer should be reported by the reviewer and an alternate reviewer shall be appointed.
5. Expression of concerns, retraction and other issues
The editors will be guided by COPE’s Guidelines for considering retracting, issuing expressions of concerns about, and issuing corrections pertaining to articles already published in the Media Researcher. The editors will maintain the integrity of the academic record by issuing corrections and retractions when needed and pursuing suspected or alleged publication misconduct.
Reviewer Responsibilities
1. Contribution to editorial decisions
The editors will base their decision on the suggestions by reviewers and the assigned editor. Reviewers assist the author in correcting and improving the manuscript.
2. Competence and promptness
Any invited reviewer should promptly notify the editor if they feel unqualified to review the manuscript or realize that its timely review would be impossible so that another reviewer can be contacted.
3. Confidentiality and objectivity
Reviewers should be aware that any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be shown and share to or discuss with third parties except if authorized by the editor. Reviewers should be conducted objectively, and their views should be clearly expressed with appropriate supporting arguments.
4. Disclosure and conflict of interest
Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage by the reviewer or the editorial team. Reviewers with conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies or institutions connected to the submission should not consider evaluating manuscripts.
Author Responsibilities
1. Authorship
Authorship should only be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study, and all those who have made these significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Others who have contributed in certain substantive aspects of the paper should be listed in the acknowledgement section. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors are included in the author list of the manuscript. The corresponding author should also be responsible for having the approval of all the co- authors in submitting the manuscript for publication.
2. Originality and plagiarism
The authors should ensure that they are submitting original work, that the manuscript has not been published before, and has only being submitted to the Media Researcher. It is also the authors’ responsibility that the research and influence of others is approximately cited. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism are both unethical and unacceptable. Should any of those cases be confirmed, the submitted paper will be rejected. The editors should clearly differentiate the minor remediable cases (e.g. one bona fide mistake) from clear plagiarism or self-plagiarism.
3. Multiple or concurrent publication
The Media Researcher expects original articles for submission, that have not been published previously. Concurrent submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. In exceptional individual cases, in explicit agreement with the editorial board, re- publications in another language may be accepted, with immediate reference to the first place of publication.
4. Disclosure and conflict of interest
Authors should disclose upon submission all forms of financial support or other substantive conflict of interest. Examples of potential conflicts of interest that should be disclosed are employment, consultancies, honoraria, paid expert testimony, grants or other funding. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.
5. Fundamental errors in published work.
When an author discovers a significant error, inaccuracy or omission in his/her article published in Media Researcher, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal’s editor and cooperate with them and either retract the paper or publish an appropriate erratum.
6. Copyright
The copyright of the published articles belongs to the Media Researcher. All articles are open access. The articles are entered into the DOI database, the Hungarian MTMT database and library repositories. The articles can be distributed and used under the Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)" licence.
7. Non-profit publishing
The Journal does not request processing fees, nor does it pay honoraria to either authors or reviewers. The Journal is financed by a non-profit public Fund (Médiakutató Alapítvány). The funding comes from donations and subscription fees for the print journal.
Use of AI
The editorial board of the Médiakutató journal’s position on the use of AI in academic publishing:
1. Manuscripts are expected, as a matter of principle, to contain original ideas and solutions, as well as new findings.
2. Should the article show signs of unethical use of AI, the editorial board of Médiakutató will reject the article without providing a detailed explanation. Such signs include, in particular, problems relating to the authenticity of the literature or the consistency of its content; for example, if a different type of content is attributed to the source, the source does not correspond to the content cited, or does not exist in that form. Similarly, content-related or stylistic features characteristic of AI that appear in the text are also considered as such. Verbatim translation constitutes plagiarism. If an author is translating and wishes to publish their own previously published text, they must indicate any overlaps in a footnote attached to the title at the time of manuscript submission. As a general principle, we do not permit authors to present text generated independently by generative AI as their own work.
3. Authors bear full responsibility for the content of the manuscript and for respecting copyright and publication ethics.
4. If the authors have used AI tools as part of their research methodology (e.g. database analysis), they must provide the relevant details in the methodology section of the article, describing how and which tool they used. It is not necessary to disclose the use of AI for linguistic correction or proofreading, nor the use of AI for formatting.
5. AI statement: The following statement must be included at the time of manuscript submission, at the end of the manuscript, immediately before the references:
a) The authors did not use generative artificial intelligence in the preparation of this work.
or:
b) In the preparation of this work, the author(s) used the [NAME OF AI TOOL/SERVICE / VERSION NUMBER] tool/service for the purpose of …[SPECIFY PURPOSE]. Following the use of the tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as necessary and accept full responsibility for the content of the publication.
