The Journal of Interdisciplinary Qur’anic Studies welcomes the use of emerging tools and technologies to facilitate and enhance scholarly research. However, in order to maintain the quality, originality, and transparency of academic work, and in alignment with the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the journal’s policy is based on the supervised, informed, and responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The following guidelines set out the requirements, principles, and appropriate practices for the use of generative artificial intelligence tools. All researchers and authors are requested to read these provisions carefully before submitting a manuscript and to comply with them throughout all stages of research and manuscript preparation.
AI is not considered an author. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and similar systems do not qualify for authorship. Authorship entails legal responsibility and scholarly accountability—responsibilities that can be assumed only by human researchers.
Accordingly, authors bear full responsibility for the scientific accuracy of their work, the accuracy of the data, and the validity of all citations and references included in the manuscript. Any fabricated references or data manipulation resulting from the inappropriate use of AI constitutes research misconduct, and full responsibility for such misconduct rests directly with the authors.
Although AI tools have considerable potential to facilitate scholarly research, from accelerating the summarization of research literature and improving academic writing to assisting with coding and preliminary data analysis, they lack genuine understanding, critical reasoning, and scholarly accountability. Uninformed or unsupervised reliance on AI may seriously compromise the accuracy, originality, and credibility of a manuscript.
The most common errors that AI may produce in scholarly writing include:
AI Hallucinations: AI models can frequently generate fabricated articles, books, author names, and DOI numbers that may appear highly credible but do not actually exist.
Plausible Falsehoods: These tools can produce incorrect analyses or inaccurate scientific information in an academic, confident, and persuasive tone. Such outputs may initially appear credible and can even mislead specialists.
Data Distortion During Rewriting: When AI is used to edit or summarize a text, seemingly minor but scientifically significant changes may occur in numerical values, units, levels of statistical significance, or the direction of reported relationships, potentially resulting in the distortion of research findings.
Generic Fluff: AI tools may produce sophisticated-sounding, ostensibly academic prose without providing precise evidence, technical details, or substantive expert analysis. In such cases, the resulting text may be polished in appearance while lacking analytical depth and rigorous reasoning.
Important Notice: The journal will not accept claims such as “the AI made a mistake” or “the author was unaware of the error in the AI-generated output” as an excuse. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the manuscript’s content, citations, and references.
To prevent errors and ensure the ethical use of AI, authors are strongly advised to observe the following principles:
Direct Consultation of Sources and Manual Verification: Any sources suggested by AI must first be independently searched for in reliable scholarly databases. Authors should cite a source only after consulting the original source directly and verifying that the information or claim attributed to it is actually present in the source. Bibliographic information, including author names, journal titles, DOI numbers, and other publication details, must also be manually checked and verified.
Verification of Data After Rewriting: If AI has been used to edit, revise, or improve the fluency of sentences, authors must compare the AI-generated output word by word with the original text to ensure that technical terminology, statistical information, numerical values, or other substantive details have not been altered.
Maintaining Human Oversight and Critical Analysis: The use of AI as an assistive tool for brainstorming, structuring analyses, or generating preliminary suggestions is permitted. However, AI-generated output must never be copied verbatim into a manuscript without careful human review and verification. Since these tools lack genuine scientific understanding, semantic comprehension, and critical reasoning, authors are required to critically assess, evaluate, review, and, where necessary, rewrite all analyses, arguments, and conclusions suggested by AI. Ultimately, the analytical and argumentative sections of a manuscript must reflect the researcher’s own intellectual, scholarly, and critical contribution, rather than the unprocessed output of an AI tool.
The Journal of Interdisciplinary Qur’anic Studies is committed to maintaining the ethical integrity and scholarly originality of its published articles. If, at any stage of the editorial process, including after final acceptance or publication, it is established that artificial intelligence has been used inappropriately in a manner that has distorted, fabricated, or compromised information presented in the manuscript, the journal will take the following actions, taking into account the nature, severity, and consequences of the violation:
Rejection: If inappropriate use of AI is established at any stage prior to publication, the manuscript will be rejected and removed from the peer-review process.