Publication Ethics & Malpractice Statement

The Indian Journal of Adult Education upholds high standards of publication ethics for all parties involved in the publishing process, including authors, reviewers, and editors. The journal expects complete originality in submitted work, with proper attribution of all sources, and treats plagiarism, data fabrication, falsification, duplicate submission, and undisclosed conflicts of interest as serious forms of misconduct that may result in manuscript rejection, retraction, or a bar on future submissions. 

Responsibilities of the Editorial Team

The Editor and the Editorial Board of the journal exercise a policy of impartiality in evaluating every manuscript that is submitted. The decision on whether a paper is accepted for publication rests with the Editorial Team, and this decision is guided solely by the scholarly quality and intellectual merit of the work, without regard to the author's gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, institutional background, or political affiliation. Members of the Editorial Team are expected to withdraw from evaluating any manuscript where they have a personal or professional conflict of interest, and they are bound to keep all details of a submission confidential, sharing them only with the corresponding author, the assigned reviewers, and the publisher. Any allegations of misconduct are investigated thoroughly by the editorial board, and corrective actions, including corrections or retractions, are issued transparently whenever they are warranted.

Responsibilities of Reviewers

Reviewers of the journal are required to serve every manuscript they examine as strictly confidential and must not discuss or disclose its contents outside the review process. Reviews must be conducted in an objective and even-handed manner, with comments and recommendations backed by clear reasoning. A reviewer who identifies published work relevant to the manuscript but not cited by the author should point this out to the editors, and any substantial resemblance between the manuscript and other published research known to the reviewer must likewise be flagged. The content and ideas found during review are privileged information and must never be used for a reviewer's personal benefit. Reviewers are also expected to decline an assignment wherever a competing, collaborative, or other relationship with the author or their institution could compromise their objectivity.

Responsibilities of Authors

Authors submitting to the journal must ensure that their manuscript represents original work that has not already been published and is not simultaneously being considered by any other journal; discovery of parallel submission will lead to rejection of the paper. Authors must ensure that any research involving human participants has received appropriate ethical clearance and that consent has been obtained where relevant, particularly for field-based and community-oriented studies common in adult education research. Where an author draws upon the work of others, appropriate acknowledgement and citation must be provided, and copyright law must be respected, with any reproduced material used only after obtaining the necessary permission. In manuscripts with more than one author, all listed authors must have made a genuine contribution to the research, the corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that every co-author is correctly listed and has approved the final version submitted, and all authors must review and consent to the proof before publication. Every source of financial or institutional support connected with the study must be clearly acknowledged.

Plagiarism

Every submission undergoes plagiarism screening using a recognised plagiarism-detection tool before it enters the review cycle. A manuscript found to contain plagiarised content at any stage of review or editing is rejected outright, and further action may be taken depending on the severity of the case. However, if plagiarism come to light after an article has already been published, the article will be withdrawn from the journal's website, a public notice of the retraction will be issued, and the matter will be communicated to the author's home institution and, where applicable, to the relevant funding body.

Conflict of Interest

At the point of submission, authors must disclose any commercial ties, consultancy arrangements, equity holdings, or licensing interests that could reasonably be seen as influencing the research or its presentation, along with any other financial or personal relationship that might affect objectivity or that stands to benefit from the study's findings. Merely naming an affiliated organisation in the author's address does not amount to such a disclosure. Details shared with the Editor for this purpose are kept strictly confidential. All financial and institutional support for the study must be recorded in the acknowledgements, or another appropriate part of the manuscript.

Peer Review Policy

All manuscripts submitted to the Indian Journal of Adult Education undergo an initial desk screening by the Editor to assess their fit with the journal's aims and scope, formatting compliance, and basic academic quality. Manuscripts that pass this initial screening proceed to a double-blind peer-review process involving at least two independent subject-matter experts, who evaluate the originality, methodological soundness, theoretical contribution, and overall academic rigour of the work without knowledge of the authors' identities, and vice versa. Reviewers provide detailed written feedback, and authors are required to revise their manuscripts to address the comments raised before a final decision is made.

The final decision on publication rests with the Editor, who weighs reviewer recommendations alongside the manuscript's overall contribution to the field. Reviewer anonymity and confidentiality are maintained throughout the process, and the editorial board draws on a growing pool of reviewers from diverse institutions to ensure that each submission is assessed fairly and rigorously.