Editorial Policies

Overview

Accounting &Taxation Review is the official journal of the International Accounting and Taxation Research domiciled in the Department of Accounting, Faculty of Management Sciences, University of Benin, Benin-City, Edo State, Nigeria. The journal is designed for reporting the results of accounting and taxation research. The scope of acceptable paper is limited to accounting, taxation and other allied discipline-related articles with emphasis on: Financial reporting, management accounting, auditing and forensic, taxation and fiscal policy, ethics, management information system, business administration, public sector accounting, international taxation, international accounting, and finance.

It is the sole responsibility of the author (s) to prepare the manuscript to meet the minimum global practices in research publication. These practices include but are not restricted to pre-submission peer- review by colleagues, self-evaluation of the ethical standards guiding research publications, (including preliminary plagiarism test) and satisfaction of standard reporting language.

Manuscript Review Process

(a). All submitted manuscripts are acknowledged and subjected to a preliminary review by the Managing Editor to ensure conformity with the publication standards set by the Editorial Advisory Board. The outcome of the preliminary review is communicated to the authors within three days of receipt of the manuscript.

(b). All manuscripts accepted after the preliminary review are sent to the Editor-in-Chief and two reviewers for review within two weeks.

(c). Recommendations and comments from the reviewers are scrutinised by the Editor-in-Chief under the strict supervision of the Editorial Advisory Board. The decision on the suitability or otherwise of the manuscript is communicated to both the author(s) and the reviewers.

(d). The revised manuscripts are sent to the same reviewers. The areas addressing the reviewers comment are required to be highlighted in red ink. Where the author(s) disagree with the reviewers, he is allowed to advance his argument which is subject to the consideration of the Editorial Advisory Board.

(e). The editors reserve the right to edit accepted papers/articles but authors will receive proofs for approval before publication. Copyright to articles published byA & TR is retained by the authors but the publication rights go to the Journal. However, the Journal/Publisher is not responsible for the subsequent use of the work.

GENERAL REQUIREMNETS

We take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of Department, Dean or the Vice Chancellor of the author's Institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.

Galley Proofs

Unless indicated otherwise, galley proofs are sent to the address given for correspondence. It is the responsibility of the corresponding authors to ensure that the galley proofs are returned without delay.

Copyright

Submission of a manuscript to this journal is a representation that the manuscript has not been published previously and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. All authors named in each manuscript would be required to sign a form (to be supplied by the Editor) so that they may retain their copyright in the article but to assign to us (the Publishers) and its licensees in perpetuity, in all forms, formats and media (whether known or created in the future) to (i) publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the contribution, (ii) translate the contribution into other languages, create adaptations, reprints, include within collections and create summaries, extracts and/or abstracts of the contribution (iii) create any other derivative work(s) based on the contribution, (iv) to exploit all subsidiary rights in the (vi) license any third party to do any or all of the above.

Ethics and Consent

(i)  Informed Consent

For all research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from all participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript.

(ii) Consent for publication

For all manuscripts that include details, images, or videos relating to individual participants, written informed consent for the publication of these must be obtained from the participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript. If the participant has died, then consent for publication must be sought from the next of kin of the participant. The consent form must be made available to the Editor on request, and will be treated confidentially. In cases where images are entirely unidentifiable and there are no details on individuals reported within the manuscript, consent for publication of images may not be required.

Availability of Data and Materials

Submission of a manuscript to a this journal indicates that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality.

We strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of any paper rely should be available to readers. Where the datasets are not directly on the paper, the location of such datasets in public domains should be specified

Software and Code

Any previously unreported software application or custom code described in the manuscript should be made available for testing by reviewers in a way that preserves their anonymity using a link to the most recent version of the software or code and a link to the archived version referenced in the manuscript. The software or code should be archived in an appropriate repository with a DOI or other unique identifier. For software in GitHub, we recommend using Zenodo.

Where the software or code implementation is not made freely available, the manuscript should not discuss the tool in any detail but focus clearly on the development of the underlying method.

Statistical Methods

Authors should include complete information on the statistical methods and measures used in their research, including justification of the appropriateness of the statistical test used.  For p values, the number of tails reported (2-tailed or 1-tailed) should be specified.

Competing Interests

We require authors to declare all competing interests in relation to their research work. All submitted manuscripts must include a ‘competing interests’ section at the end of the manuscript listing all competing interests, whether financial or non-financial. A competing interest exists when the authors’ interpretation of data or presentation of information may be influenced by their personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations.

Where authors have no competing interests, the statement should read “The author(s) declare(s) that they have no competing interests”.

Authorship

To give appropriate credit to each author, we require that the individual contributions of authors should be specified in the manuscript. Details of this information are provided in the Guidelines for Contributors.

Please note that an 'author' is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not usually justify authorship. According to the ICMJE guidelines, to qualify as an author one should have:

Authors should understand that removal or addition of any name of an author cannot be made after acceptance of a manuscript.

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship may be listed in an ‘Acknowledgements’ section. The source of funding should also be acknowledged. For research grants, the name of the funding body and the grant number may be specified, as appropriate.

Any involvement of writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be acknowledged as described.

Duplicate publication

Any manuscript submitted to this journal for review must be original and the manuscript, or substantial parts of it, must not be under consideration by any other journal. Generally, the manuscript must not already have been formally published in any journal or in any other citable form.  If the abstract of the manuscript has been published previously, the same title earlier published must not be used. In any case where there is the potential for overlap or duplication, we require transparency of authors. Authors are expected to declare any potentially overlapping publications on submission and any overlapping publications should be cited. Articles “in press” and unpublished work should not be cited.

We do not accept plagiarised work and we take seriously all cases of publication misconduct. Any suspected cases of covert duplicate manuscript submission will be handled as outlined in the COPE guidelines and we endorses the policies of ICMJE guidelines in relation to overlapping publications.

Corrections and Retractions

On rare occasions, it may be necessary for us to publish corrections to, or retractions of, articles published in this journal, in order to maintain the integrity of the academic record. Correction or retraction of any published article will be made by publishing an Erratum or a Retraction article and adding a prominent link to the Erratum/Retraction article. For PDF files of retracted articles, the word “Retracted” will be marked clearly on the article. It is only in the exceptional event where that material is considered to infringe certain rights or is defamatory, that we may have to remove it from our site and archive sites. We follow follow the COPE guidelines (http://publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf)

Appeals and Complaints

All authors reserve the right to appeal or complain against editorial decisions on manuscripts submitted to us. We adhere to COPE guidelinesin respect of appeals to editorial decisions and complaints.