Link to Decision flow chart on gift authorship

Page on authorship

Citation manipulation occurs when editors, reviewers, or collaborators pressure authors to include citations to boost citation rates of a journal or a scholar's work. Please report any concerns about possible citation manipulations to the ICB editor or the SICB president (see also case study below).

Citation stacking occurs when authors cite their own work or the work of their collaborators to boost citation rates. Violations may lead to the journal reporting authors to their institution's offices for research integrity.

Reference quality. Please check prior to submitting your manuscript, that none of the cited references have been retracted; do not cite retracted articles. Please ensure that the references cited in your manuscript in support of a particular fact do in fact contain a statement in support of this fact; do not rely on indirect evidence and secondary sources, such as AI-generated summaries or citations in other articles.

AI-generated references. ICB reserves the right to reject manuscripts that contain fake references, commonly caused by using LLMs to generate and edit references. 

More information on 

• citation manipulation: article and case study provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

• citation stacking: article provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

• reference quality: case study provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

Integrative and Comparative Biology strongly discourages the use of LLMs (large language model) AI tools to generate and edit text. All use of AI tools to generate or edit text must be disclosed and explained in the manuscript's acknowledgement section. 

ICB reserves the right to reject manuscripts that contain so-called hallucinations caused by using LLMs, such as non-existent references.

Resources

• authorship and AI tools COPE position paper 

• Peters, Uwe, and Benjamin Chin-Yee. "Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research." Royal Society Open Science 12, no. 4 (2025): 241776.

• Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Please contact the editor in chief immediately (Editor.ICB@sicb.org).

Resources for appeals and complaints

• suspected misconduct or unprofessional peer reviews

  • reviewer may have appropriated information from a manuscript (link to external information provided by COPE)

• unfair rejection of the manuscript

  • see ICB appeal procedure

Link to Position paper on when it is OK to publish anonymously

Authors may wish to publish under a pseudonym or anonymously. Under special circumstances, anonymising the author or agreeing to the use of a pseudonym is permissible, for example if their safety would be compromised by having their name published. This solution is preferable to omitting an author from the author list (ghost authorship), because there is some acknowledgement of their contribution and partial transparency around the issue.

If authors fear that their manuscript may not be reviewed fairly unless they submit the manuscript anonymously, please reach out to the editors, so the manuscript can be reviewed double blind.  Link to relevant case study.

Omitting institutional affiliations (using a private address instead of an institutional address) is permissible if the work was conducted as a private person. Under special circumstances, omitting the institutional affiliation is permissible, for example if the author's safety would be compromised by having their affiliation published.

Resources on censorship