Research Ethics & Consent

Research published in TECS must meet recognised ethical standards. Although much engineering and computing research is not clinical or field-based, it frequently involves human participants, personal data, security-sensitive findings or artificial-intelligence systems with societal impact, and the requirements below apply accordingly. Authors must include a statement addressing each relevant item, or explain why it does not apply.

Human participants and user studies

Research involving people — including user studies, usability and human–computer-interaction experiments, surveys and crowdsourced studies — must comply with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki and with all applicable national and institutional requirements. Authors must obtain approval from a research ethics committee or institutional review board where required, report the approving body and reference number, and obtain informed consent to participate and, where individuals are identifiable, to publish.

Personal data and privacy

Personal data must be processed lawfully, fairly and transparently, minimised, and anonymised or pseudonymised wherever possible, in line with applicable data-protection law (see the Privacy Policy). Where research uses datasets containing personal or human-generated data, authors must confirm that the data were obtained and used lawfully and in accordance with their licences and any consent obtained.

Security research and responsible disclosure

Research that discovers security vulnerabilities should follow responsible, coordinated disclosure. Where feasible, affected vendors or operators should be notified and given a reasonable opportunity to remediate before publication, and the manuscript should describe the disclosure timeline. Authors should avoid publishing operational detail whose primary effect would be to enable harm, and should describe the measures taken to mitigate risk.

Dual use and responsible AI

Authors must consider whether their findings could be misused to cause harm (dual use) and describe relevant safeguards. For research involving artificial intelligence, authors should, where relevant, address fairness, bias, safety, transparency and societal impact, disclose the provenance and licensing of training data, and avoid overstating capabilities. The journal may seek additional review where a manuscript raises significant security, dual-use or societal-impact concerns.

Declarations

Each manuscript must include an Ethics and Consent statement covering the relevant approvals, consents and data-handling measures, or stating clearly that these are not applicable and why. The journal may request supporting documentation and may decline or retract work that does not meet these standards.