Artificial Intelligence (AI) Usage Policy

Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Generative AI Policy

Psychosocia: Journal of Applied Psychology and Social Psychology supports responsible AI use while maintaining human accountability, research integrity, confidentiality, participant protection, and transparency.

HUMAN ACCOUNTABILITY AI DISCLOSURE CONFIDENTIALITY
✓ AI may assist manuscript preparation. ✓ Meaningful AI use must be disclosed.
✓ Authors remain fully responsible for all content. ✕ AI tools cannot be authors or co-authors.
✕ Reviewers/editors must not upload confidential manuscripts to AI. ✕ AI must not replace human scientific, clinical, psychological, 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, preliminary data exploration, or manuscript preparation. AI tools must not replace the authors' critical thinking, psychological interpretation, scholarly judgment, analysis, clinical reasoning, ethical responsibility, or original 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, misleading psychological claims, or inappropriate generalizations;
  • protecting confidential, personal, clinical, psychological, copyrighted, and unpublished data;
  • ensuring that AI-generated suggestions do not replace professional psychological judgment or research interpretation; and
  • ensuring that the final manuscript represents the authors' own scholarly work.
Important: Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, integrity, participant protection, 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 must be disclosed in a separate AI Declaration. The declaration should identify the tool used, its purpose, and the extent of human review and oversight.

Suggested AI Declaration
The authors used [tool/model name] for [specific purpose]. All AI-assisted outputs were critically reviewed, verified, and substantially revised by the authors. The authors take full responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, originality, and ethical compliance of the manuscript.

Basic spelling, grammar, or punctuation checks do not normally require disclosure. If AI forms part of the research method, psychological assessment process, data analysis, text analysis, behavioral analysis, computational modeling, or experimental procedure, its use must be described in sufficient detail in the Methods section.

3. AI and Authorship

AI tools, chatbots, 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 its content, protection of research participants, and the ability to respond to questions regarding the research.

4. AI-Generated Images, Figures & Artwork

Generative AI must not be used to create, manipulate, obscure, remove, or introduce features in research images, psychological assessment materials, experimental stimuli, clinical images, behavioral evidence, figures, or visual data submitted as research evidence in a manner that misrepresents the original data.

An exception may apply when AI-assisted imaging, synthetic stimuli, computational image generation, or automated visual analysis is part of the research design or methodology. In such cases, authors must describe the tool, model/version, procedure, validation process, 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, supporting files, participant information, psychological data, clinical data, interview transcripts, 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 psychological validity, determine manuscript quality, or determine review recommendations. Reviewers remain personally responsible for the content, reasoning, fairness, and integrity of their reports.

6. Use of AI by Editors

Editors must not upload submitted manuscripts, confidential correspondence, reviewer reports, participant information, psychological records, unpublished research data, 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 editorial evaluation, ethical assessment, communication, reviewer selection, 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, with human oversight and appropriate confidentiality safeguards.

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

Violations & Consequences

Misuse or undisclosed use of AI may be handled under the journal's publication-ethics procedures. Depending on severity, actions may include request for clarification, manuscript rejection, correction, retraction, institutional notification, ethics-committee notification, or restrictions on future submissions.

Policy Governance

This policy follows principles of transparency, accountability, confidentiality, human oversight, fairness, participant protection, intellectual-property protection, psychological research ethics, and research integrity. It will be reviewed periodically as AI technologies and international publication standards evolve.