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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 Please check prior to submitting your manuscript, that none of the cited references have been retracted; do not cite retracted articles.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.

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. 

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