Policies

Editorial Policy

Structure & Sense is dedicated to publishing social scientific and humanistic research. The journal does not accept submissions involving human subjects research that includes the administration of novel drug or medical therapies.

If accepted, authors retain ownership of their article. Structure & Sense reserves the right to remove publications from its catalog if an article is later discovered to contain erroneous findings, defamatory claims, or for any other reason relevant to the standing of the journal.

Conflicts of Interest

All authors must disclose any financial, institutional, or personal relationships that could be perceived as influencing the submitted work. Editors and reviewers who have a conflict of interest with a submission — including prior collaboration, institutional affiliation, or personal relationship with an author — are recused from handling that submission. Editors are responsible for declaring conflicts to the editorial staff and will be replaced by an unaffiliated editor in such cases.

Data Availability

Structure & Sense encourages authors to make their data available in an appropriate repository upon publication. We recognize that research in the social sciences and humanities frequently involves data that cannot be fully shared due to confidentiality obligations, participant privacy, or the nature of qualitative materials. Authors are asked to include a data availability statement indicating what data are available, where they are deposited, and any restrictions on access.

Human Subjects Statement

Authors conducting research involving human subjects are expected to have obtained appropriate ethical approval from an Institutional Review Board or equivalent body where such approval is required. Authors should indicate in their manuscript whether ethical approval was obtained and provide the name of the approving institution. Where ethical approval is not applicable, authors should state this clearly.

Preprints

Structure & Sense accepts articles that have appeared as preprints under the following conditions:

The submitted draft contains substantial revisions that make it distinct from the preprint version
The corresponding author provides an explanation of how the submitted version differs from the preprint
Authors should cite the preprint and ensure metadata reflects the peer-reviewed version upon acceptance

We recommend depositing preprints with OSF Preprints, arXiv, or SSRN.

AI Use Disclosure

AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.

Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, the production of images or graphical elements, or in the collection and analysis of data, must disclose in the Methods section or equivalent how the tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, including those parts produced by an AI tool, and are liable for any breach of publication ethics.

See COPE’s position on authorship and AI for further guidance.

Authorship

Authorship should be determined according to the CRediT taxonomy. Contributors who do not meet authorship criteria should be acknowledged appropriately.

Role	Description
Conceptualization	Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
Data Curation	Management activities to annotate, scrub, and maintain research data for initial and future use
Formal Analysis	Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize data
Funding Acquisition	Acquisition of financial support for the project
Investigation	Conducting the research and investigation process, including data and evidence collection
Methodology	Development or design of methodology; creation of models
Project Administration	Management and coordination of research activity planning and execution
Resources	Provision of study materials, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
Software	Programming, software development, implementation of code and algorithms
Supervision	Oversight and leadership of research activity, including mentorship
Validation	Verification of replication and reproducibility of results and other research outputs
Visualization	Preparation and presentation of published work, specifically data visualization
Writing — Original Draft	Preparation of the initial draft, including substantive translation
Writing — Review & Editing	Critical review, commentary, or revision at pre- or post-publication stages

Plagiarism

All submissions are screened prior to review. Manuscripts exceeding acceptable similarity thresholds may be rejected without review.

Corrections and Retractions

Structure & Sense follows the COPE guidelines on corrections and retractions. Three categories of post-publication amendment are recognized:

Corrections — minor errors that do not affect the findings or interpretation of a published article are corrected in place with a dated amendment note
Errata — errors introduced by the journal during editing or production are noted formally with a dated erratum
Retractions — articles found to contain fundamental errors or serious ethical breaches that invalidate their findings may be retracted following investigation

Articles will not be retracted on the basis of failure to replicate. Where a published article has been subject to a replication attempt with materially different findings, a note will be added to the published record indicating the relationship between the original and follow-up study.

Concerns Regarding a Published Article

The scientific enterprise is one in which knowledge is continuously revisited. Concerns regarding a published article in Structure & Sense — including plagiarism, falsification of findings, or duplication — should be directed to the editorial staff at editor@structureandsense.org.

Concerns will be investigated on a case by case basis. Raising a concern is not in itself sufficient grounds for retraction or formal statement; each case will be evaluated according to its merits. Authors found to have committed serious ethical breaches may be prohibited from future submission for a defined period.