Editorial Policies

The Journal’s policy is to publish original articles, written by those who declare authorship, unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere.

In order to give response to more widely aspects of plagiarism -translations, results fragmentation or “salami slicing”, duplications, among others- the Journal implements a specific procedure for its avoidance, consisting on the following:

At the time of submission, authors are requested to declare that the article hasn’t been previously published or sent to other journal for evaluation. Besides, they are required to declare compliance of Author Guidelines, where it’s established that submitted articles must be original.
When receiving an article -and before its evaluation- an exhaustive procedure is conducted to confirm originality and avoid plagiarism practices. This include different Web Search tools to find other articles written by the authors and compare their title, abstract, methodology and results.
When sent to evaluation, referees are asked to contemplate potential plagiarism indicators, given their knowledge of that topic’s specific literature.

The Journal considers as plagiarism the following practices:

Direct Plagiarism:

Omission of authorship and quotation of fragments taken from other articles.
Minimum changes to another author’s article and then presented as an original manuscript.

Plagiarism by inadequate use of paraphrase:

Even that authorship is annotated, there exists some changes to the original article that don’t constitute paraphrase.

Complex plagiarism using a reference:

Original authorship is referenced but the source’s pages are not clearly defined.
Paraphrase that consist of summarizing long texts, without explicit indication of paraphrasing.
Absence of quotation marks when reproducing phrases or words from the original article.

Plagiarism by incorrect quotations marks:

After closing quotation marks, there’s still reproduction of a direct quotation.

Paraphrase as plagiarism:

Paraphrasing without indication of the original article.
Continuing and long paraphrasing that, although being properly referenced, it fails in adding new material that allows interaction or enriches the information.
Academic work that constitutes nothing more than repetition of other articles.
Paraphrased passages not correctly identified.

It is NOT considered plagiarism when:

It’s not dominating the author’s own work.
Its usage allows the author to critically interact with another person’s point of view.
The original text’s argument is rewritten with different words.

Self-plagiarism or recycling fraud:

A previous article is modified in appearance and presented as a different manuscript.
Omission to mention that the current article is being recycled, that is, a previously published article with corrections or new relevant additions.

It is NOT considered self-plagiarism when:

The previous article is an input for a new contribution and key aspect of the argument must be repeated.
The author considers that what is being repeated cannot be explained in a better way.
Repetition doesn’t exceed 30% of the original article.

Ethical aspects and conflicts of interest

Every issue of Económica constitutes the collective result of the effort made by authors, editors and referees interested on the development of Science for cultural and social matters. Because of that and aligned with the open access policy to which the National University of La Plata adheres, we won’t charge authors for publication nor readers for accessing any article.

The editors of Económica compromise to avoid any conflict of interest between the participants of the production process. Any submitted article will be evaluated regarding its intellectual content, without interference of the author’s ethnic precedence, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or political philosophy. In the same way, any external evaluation that involves a personal opposition of the article’s quality will be disregarded.

Authors and referees are requested to manifest beforehand any relevant conflict of interest that they could have so that they could be considered when assigning evaluations. If a conflict of interest arises after publication, there’ll be a public manifest of the fact.

A “conflict of interest” is understood as the divergence between an individual’s personal interests and his responsibilities on the scientific activities he develops (as author, referee or editor) that may influence his critical judgement and the integrity of his actions. A conflict of interest may be:

Economic: the participant (author/referee/editor) has or will receive a payment for the activities related to research or diffusion.
Academic: editors or referees defend a certain ideological or methodological perspective, such that they may be biased for evaluating another people’s work.
Personal or work relations: the participants (author/referee/editor) have any kind of friendship or labor relation. To prevent that from happening, editors must consider the authors’ sources of financing and affiliation to select referees that don’t belong to same specific circles.

International alignment

Different international entities have worked in making consensus about criteria and guidelines to support authors and editors, including:

We contemplate these international guidelines when resolving specific problems in the scientific editorial practice. We mainly adhere to COPE | Committee on Publication Ethics.

In the same manner, we’ll contemplate other guidelines proposed by recognized institutions such as como International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Council of Science Editors and Office of Research Integrity (ORI) | U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Authors and referees are invited to get informed about international guidelines about publication ethics, to avoid faults generated by their omission.

COPE | Committee on Publication Ethics

Provides guidelines for the following scenarios: