Publication Policy and Ethics

International Relations is committed to maintain the highest academic and ethical standards in line with the principles of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE).

The Journal ensures an unbiased consideration for each work submitted. This means each manuscript is judged on its merits without regard race, religion, nationality, sex, political view, seniority, or institutional affiliation of the author(s).

The Editorial Board and the editors of the Journal are obliged to ensure the confidentiality of the submitted works until they are published, except in the case of suspicion of double submission or plagiarism. In cases where the Editorial Board decide not to publish a material, it is the responsibility of the editors and the Editorial Board that no information will be disseminated to any person other than the author(s) and the manuscript will not be used by the Journal for other purposes.

Studies that violate the academic and legal criteria such as double submission, plagiarism and/or violation of copyright laws are not evaluated. If and when such violations are determined during the evaluation period, the review process is immediately stopped and the study is returned to the author(s).

The Journal adheres to double blind review process. In cases where the referee evaluations are contradictory or inadequate, the editors and/or the Editorial Board may ask for additional review(s).

The main task of the reviewers is to contribute to the editors’ decision on publishing a submitted manuscript. The reviewers are obliged to ensure the confidentiality of the submitted works during the evaluation, and they must not use the information obtained through peer review process for personal interest. The reviewers should not consider a manuscript in which they have conflict of interest with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers. The reviewers should objectively and critically evaluate the work, and must avoid personal comments on the author(s).

The publication decision on submitted works are collectively taken by the Editorial Board, the Managing and Associate Editors, and the Editor-in-Chief based on the reviewer’s reports. The final decision for publishing the manuscripts that have succeeded in all evaluation processes rests with the Editorial Board of the Journal. The Journal does not have to provide a reason to the authors whose manuscripts are not published.

The authors should ensure that they have submitted entirely original works to the Journal. The authors should appropriately cite all the materials used in the work. All attempts of plagiarism are resulted in rejection of the submitted manuscript. Authors should not submit the same work or essentially the same research in more than one journal at the same time. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and would result immediate rejection.

All kinds of research carried out with qualitative or quantitative approaches that require data collection from participants using survey, interview, focus group work, observation, experiment, interview techniques, etc., and retrospective studies in accordance with the Law on the Protection of Personal Data, require permission from the ethics committee.

It is also necessary to state in the research paper that “Informed Consent Form” has been obtained in case reports, to take and state permissions from the copyright owners of formulations, surveys, photographs, etc., and to indicate that copyright regulations for the thought pieces and works of art have been complied with.

Authors are allowed to re-submit their rejected manuscripts after revising them in accordance with reviewers’ reports. The manuscripts that are judged by the Editorial Board to be not adjusted enough to address the concerns raised by the reviewer(s) are rejected. Others are accepted for the evaluation process as a new submission.

International Relations is an open access journal, which means it is free to access all manuscripts online as soon as they are published. There are no article publishing charges for the submitted works.