Editorial Policies & Publication Ethics

JSHE operates in full compliance with the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). All parties involved in the publishing process — authors, reviewers, editors, and the publisher — are expected to uphold these standards without exception.

Editorial Independence

The Editor-in-Chief and the editorial team exercise complete independence in all editorial decisions. Decisions are based solely on scientific merit, originality, methodological soundness, ethical compliance, and relevance to the journal's scope. Spectrum Scholarly Press has no influence whatsoever on individual editorial decisions, including acceptance, rejection, or revision of manuscripts. The editorial process is insulated entirely from commercial considerations.

Research Involving Human or Animal Subjects

All research involving human participants must have received prior ethical approval from an appropriate institutional review board (IRB) or ethics committee before the study commenced. The submitted manuscript must include the name of the ethics committee that granted approval, the approval reference number, and a clear statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all participants or their legally authorized representatives. For studies involving animal subjects, authors must declare compliance with the institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals. Studies lacking the required ethics statements will be returned to authors before peer review.

Clinical Trial Registration

JSHE requires that all randomized controlled trials be prospectively registered in a publicly accessible clinical trial registry prior to enrolment of the first participant. Acceptable registries include ClinicalTrials.gov, the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN) Registry, the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR), and equivalent WHO-recognized registries. The trial registration number and the name of the registry must be stated in the Methods section of the manuscript and declared at the point of submission.

Data Integrity and Reproducibility

Authors are expected to maintain complete, accurate, and transparent records of their data, methods, and analysis. JSHE strongly encourages — and for certain article types may require — the submission of raw data, analysis scripts, or study materials as supplementary files or via deposition in a publicly accessible data repository such as the Open Science Framework (OSF), figshare, Zenodo, or Dryad. A Data Availability Statement is mandatory in all manuscripts. The statement must clearly indicate whether data are publicly available, available upon reasonable request, or restricted, and must provide the relevant repository link and access conditions where applicable.