The Journal of the Geological Survey of Brazil (JGSB) adopts the guidelines set forth by international organizations about plagiarism, authorship criteria, best practices (erratum, corrigendum, retraction), and ethics on scholarly publishing, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (http://publicationethics.org/), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (https://doaj.org/publishers#advice), and the Council of Science Editors (https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/).

PLAGIARISM

JGSB uses the Crossref Similarity Check system (iThenticate) to detect text similarity, plagiarism, and self-plagiarism. In the case of suspicion or detection of these issues, manuscripts are returned to the author(s), who have to explain the fact. In case of a confirmed detection of plagiarism, the manuscripts are excluded from the review process.

MISCONDUCT
If it is suspected that misconduct has occurred, the Editor-in-Chief will initiate an investigation in accordance with COPE guidelines. Depending on the severity and stage of submission or publication, this may lead to:
- Rejection of the manuscript under consideration;
- Erratum for (i) correction of information; (ii) inclusion of information; and (iii) exclusion of information of involuntary and honest errors that do not affect the structure of the article (other exclusions must be carried out by means of retraction);
- Partial or complete retraction of the article.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

All actors involved in the submission-review-publishing process (authors, co-authors, editorial board, and reviewers) must reveal any conflict (or possibility of) interest, including financial, personal or institutional issues that can influence the evaluation-publishing process.

This is done on the JGSB editorial platform during submission (by the authors) and when agreeing to review (by the reviewers).

CONFIDENTIALITY IN THE PROCESSING OF THE MANUSCRIPT
Manuscripts submitted to JGSB are confidential documents and all actors involved in the submission-review-publishing process (authors, editorial board, reviewers, and publishing staff) must maintain the confidentiality of and not share or discuss details regarding the submitted manuscripts, which includes the submission itself, its status and any other content (reports, correspondence etc..).

All correspondence regarding a submitted manuscript should be addressed solely by the corresponding author to the Editor-in-Chief or to the Associate Editor (with a copy to the Editor-in-Chief).

Private contact between parties (authors and reviewers) related to the manuscript under review will not be tolerated and will result in the interruption of the processing and rejection of the manuscript.

Reviewers and editors are required not to use or cite data or information of manuscripts under review in their own works.

AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORSHIP CHANGES

Authors are those researchers who participated in the conception/design and supervision of the project from which the submitted article resulted, the researchers who participated in the collection and/or interpretation and/or validation of data and in the writing of the manuscript, as well as those who contributed in manuscript editing and revision. Artificial intelligence tools do not meet these criteria, so they are not considered authors.

The order of authors in the manuscript is a decision of the research group and must be defined before the manuscript is submitted for publication. Any changes in this initial authorship order or inclusion/exclusion of authors after the initial submission of a manuscript should be justified in written and the document must be signed by all authors, including those being added or excluded. Failure to comply with this requirement will result in rejection of the manuscript.

An author contribution statement must be provided by the authors (please fill this file)

USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS

The use of large language models - LLM (artificial intelligence tools, chatbot etc...) must be transparent and declared and specified in some appropriate section of the submitted manuscript (preferably in the sections on methods, or introduction, or acknowledgments). As noted above, in the section on authorship, artificial intelligence tools are prohibited from authoring research articles.

Editors, reviewers, and authors must be aware that using artificial intelligence technology in the processing of manuscripts may violate confidentiality.

REVIEWER RECOGNITION

As stated in the Peer Review section, the reviewers’ significant contributions are essential to the academic publishing process, and JGSB acknowledges these contributions. The list of reviewers for each year is made available online with the December issue.