- Caspian Journal of Scientometrics and its publisher Babol University of Medical Science (BUMS) adhere to the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors and the Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers. The journal also follows recommendations contained in A Guide for Editors-in-Chief, Associate Editors, and Managing Editors.
- All copyrights reserved to the publisher in this Journal (Babol University of Medical Science).
- Reserved the right to accept, reject, correct and edit the article in any stage and time by the Editorial Board of the journal.

Open Access Statement
All articles are published by this journal.
The Journal is fully open access journal, which means that all articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication. 
 

Plagiarism and Similarity Rates
The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works. If the authors have used the work and/or words of others, they should appropriately cite or quote.

 
Retraction Regulations
The retraction may be initiated by the editors of the journal, or by the author(s) of the paper. However, since the editors are responsible for the journal’s content, they always make the final decision to retract the material. The journal editors may retract publications even if all or some of the authors refuse to retract the publication.
 
When should a publication be retracted?
Only published items can be retracted. Publications should be retracted as soon as possible when the journal editors are convinced that the publication is seriously flawed and misleading (or is redundant or plagiarized).
What Are the Compelling Reasons?

• Plagiarism

• Bogus claims of authorship

• Multiple submissions

• Fraudulent data

• Infringements of ethical codes

• Redundant publication

• Failure to disclose a major competing interest

Should a retraction be applied in cases of disputed authorship?
Authors sometimes request that articles are retracted when authorship is disputed after publication. If there is no reason to doubt the validity of the findings or the reliability of the data it is not appropriate to retract a publication solely for an authorship dispute. In such cases, the journal editor should inform those who are involved in the dispute that she/he cannot adjudicate in such cases, but they may be willing to publish a correction to the author/contributor list if the authors/contributors (or their institutions) provide appropriate proof that such a change is justified.
Article Retraction Process

• A retraction note entitled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.

• In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.

• The original article is retained unchanged saving for a watermark on the pdf. file version on each page to indicate that it is “retracted.”

• The HTML version of the document is removed.

Wager E, Barbour V, Yentis S, Kleinert S. Retraction Guidelines. Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Sep 2009. Available from: http://publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf
 
Withdrawal Regulations
 Definitions

• Withdrawal is an action that takes the manuscript out of the review process and places it back into the author's dashboard. Generally, we do not suggest the article withdrawal, since it wastes valuable manuscript processing time, cost and works spent by the publisher.

• Article withdrawal is applied to submitted papers either within peer review process or accepted for publication that is for the moment only available in a pre-publication form (“Early Release or Ahead of Print”). These sometimes contain errors or are articles that may have already been published and then mistakenly resubmitted for publication elsewhere. Articles may also be retracted to allow authors’ to correct any errors that had not been identified before submission.

Withdrawal Steps

• Pre-Review: is a period at which the author(s) submit(s) her/his article until to be sent for the review. The author(s) can withdraw their papers at this step without paying any charges and/or posing compelling reasons.

• Peer-Review: is a period at which the manuscript is submitted completely to the website and is included in the review process. The authors must have compelling reasons and pay cost as the withdrawal penalty.

• Review-Final Decision: is a period from the acceptance of an article until to be sent for publication if the article meets the journal standards. The authors should have their compelling reasons and pay the cost of peer review as the withdrawal penalty.

• Post-Publication: when a paper is published (online and/or hard copy). Withdrawing at this step is not possible at all.

Republishing
Republishing is regarded as Plagiarism in this Journal.
The journal explicitly instructs authors not to submit papers or variations of papers that have already been published elsewhere even in other languages, especially, those articles which are published in local journals (in local languages) are not permitted to be submitted to this journal.