Artificial Intelligence (AI) Usage Policy

Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Generative AI Policy

Curatio: Journal of Advanced and Specialized Nursing, and Care Planning supports responsible AI use while maintaining human accountability, research integrity, patient confidentiality, clinical safety, transparency, and ethical nursing practice.

HUMAN ACCOUNTABILITY AI DISCLOSURE CONFIDENTIALITY
✓ AI may assist manuscript preparation and limited research tasks. ✓ Meaningful AI use must be disclosed.
✓ Authors remain fully responsible for all content, clinical interpretation, and conclusions. ✕ AI tools cannot be authors or co-authors.
✕ Reviewers/editors must not upload confidential manuscripts or patient data to public AI systems. ✕ AI must not replace human scientific, clinical, nursing, or editorial judgment.
1. Use of AI by Authors

Authors may use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies to support activities such as language improvement, literature organization, idea development, data exploration, transcription support, preliminary coding assistance, visualization, or manuscript preparation. AI tools must not replace the authors' critical thinking, scientific judgment, clinical reasoning, nursing judgment, interpretation, care-planning responsibility, or original scholarly contribution.

Authors are responsible for:

  • verifying factual accuracy and checking references generated by AI;
  • reviewing and substantially editing AI-assisted content;
  • checking for bias, hallucination, fabricated citations, inaccurate clinical information, or misleading recommendations;
  • independently validating AI-assisted coding, analysis, classifications, interpretations, and clinical or nursing-related outputs;
  • protecting confidential, personal, clinical, copyrighted, proprietary, and unpublished data;
  • ensuring that no identifiable patient or participant information is entered into public AI systems without lawful authorization and appropriate safeguards; and
  • ensuring that the final manuscript represents the authors' own scholarly work and professional judgment.
Important: Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, clinical safety, integrity, and ethical compliance of all submitted content, regardless of whether AI tools were used.
2. AI Disclosure

Meaningful use of generative AI in manuscript preparation, qualitative coding, data analysis, visualization, literature synthesis, clinical information processing, or other research activities must be disclosed in a separate AI Declaration. The declaration should identify the tool or model used, its purpose, the tasks performed, and the extent of human review, verification, and professional oversight.

Suggested AI Declaration
The authors used [tool/model name and version] for [specific purpose]. All AI-assisted outputs were critically reviewed, independently verified, and substantially revised by the authors. No AI system was used to replace human clinical or scholarly judgment. The authors take full responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, originality, and ethical compliance of the manuscript.

Basic spelling, grammar, punctuation, or conventional language editing does not normally require disclosure. If AI forms part of the research method, qualitative analysis, predictive model, clinical decision-support evaluation, image analysis, data processing, or statistical analysis, its use must be described in sufficient technical detail in the Methods section.

3. AI and Authorship

AI tools, chatbots, autonomous systems, and language models must not be listed as authors or co-authors. Authorship requires human responsibility for the integrity of the work, approval of the final manuscript, accountability for scientific and clinical content, and the ability to respond to questions regarding the research, patient protection, nursing implications, data, analysis, and conclusions.

4. AI-Generated Images, Figures & Clinical Visual Materials

Generative AI must not be used to create, manipulate, obscure, remove, or introduce features in clinical images, nursing documentation, diagnostic images, wound images, patient photographs, monitoring outputs, charts, figures, or other research images submitted as evidence in a manner that misrepresents the underlying data.

AI-assisted enhancement must not alter clinically relevant features, patient findings, measured outcomes, or the evidentiary value of the image or figure.

An exception may apply when AI-assisted imaging, computer vision, predictive modeling, synthetic-data generation, or digital-health technology is part of the research design or methodology. In such cases, authors must describe the tool, model/version, procedure, validation process, dataset characteristics, safeguards, and its role in generating or interpreting research data in the Methods section.

5. Use of AI by Reviewers

Submitted manuscripts are confidential documents. Reviewers must not upload manuscripts, manuscript excerpts, patient information, clinical images, nursing records, supplementary files, datasets, or review reports into public generative AI systems.

Peer review is a human scholarly responsibility. AI tools must not be used to generate scientific assessments, independently evaluate clinical quality, determine methodological validity, assess patient safety, or produce review recommendations. Reviewers remain personally responsible for the accuracy, fairness, confidentiality, and integrity of their reports.

6. Use of AI by Editors

Editors must not upload submitted manuscripts, confidential correspondence, reviewer reports, patient information, clinical data, unpublished nursing records, or editorial decision letters into public generative AI systems.

AI must not replace human editorial judgment or be used to determine acceptance, revision, or rejection. Editors remain fully responsible for scientific evaluation, clinical and nursing relevance, ethical assessment, communication, confidentiality, and final publication decisions.

7. AI in the Publication Workflow

The journal may use appropriately controlled AI-assisted technologies for limited technical and administrative purposes, provided that confidentiality, patient privacy, research integrity, security, validation, and human oversight are maintained.

✓ Technical submission checks ✓ Duplicate-submission detection
✓ Research-integrity screening ✓ Reviewer matching support
✓ Copyediting and production assistance ✓ Identification of technical inconsistencies
✓ Metadata and formatting support ✓ Limited administrative workflow support
Human oversight remains mandatory throughout all editorial and publication processes.

Violations & Consequences

Misuse, undisclosed use, deceptive use, unsafe use, or confidentiality breaches involving AI may be handled under the journal's publication-ethics procedures. Depending on severity, actions may include request for clarification, requirement for additional validation, manuscript rejection, correction, retraction, institutional notification, ethics-committee notification where appropriate, or restrictions on future submissions.

Policy Governance

This policy follows principles of transparency, accountability, confidentiality, human oversight, patient privacy, clinical safety, fairness, intellectual-property protection, data protection, nursing ethics, and research integrity. It will be reviewed periodically as AI technologies, digital-health systems, clinical applications, nursing practice, and international publication standards evolve.