AI Policy

For Authors

The Journal of Black Military Studies (JBMS) follows the authorship and Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)(COPE... c2024). AI tools, such as ChatGPT, cannot be listed as authors on papers as they are non-legal entities and cannot take responsibility for the published work.

Allowed

As long as authors are fully transparent about their AI tool use (see Required Disclosures), authors may use AI tools to assist in:

      • editing/proofreading the manuscript,
      • producing images or graphical elements,
      • coding, or collecting and analyzing data.

Forbidden

Authors may not use AI tools:

      • to draft any portion of a cover letter
      • to draft any portion of a manuscript
      • to create end notes or bibliographic references
      • to draft manuscript revisions
      • to write responses to reviewers.

Required Disclosures

      • A full description of which AI tools were used, and how they were used, must be included in an “AI Disclosure Statement” that appears in the manuscript after the Acknowledgments section.
        • If AI tools were not used, the AI Disclosure Statement should read, “Generative AI tools were not used to organize, write, or edit this manuscript.”
      • This statement must also be provided during the submission process.
      • Any content generated or edited by an AI tool must be carefully checked by the authors for accuracy.
      • Authors are fully responsible for the content of their entire manuscript, and are therefore liable for any breach of publication ethics.

Citation/reference managers, such as Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley, and built-in proofreading or grammar assistants are not considered AI tools under this policy.

Guidelines for AI Tool Use

If you use choose to use AI tools in the preparation of your JBMS submission, please do so responsibly and judiciously. Follow these guidelines:

  • Review the terms and conditions of any AI tool before using it.
  • Record this information for each use of AI (MIT Libraries...Home 2024) and keep it for your records.
    • Tool name and version
    • General reason for use of the tool
    • Name(s) of author(s) generating query
    • Date and time of query
    • Query and response wording
    • Any additional relevant information
  • Also consider linking to your AI-generated output within your paper by following these suggestions from the MIT Libraries (MIT Libraries...Saving... 2024). Include citation information whenever you have used AI tools to gather information, write text, edit text, synthesize ideas, find connections, or clean and manipulate data (MIT Libraries...home 2024).
  • Cite AI tools within the text as personal communication. Do not include an end reference. Instead, include full descriptions of AI tool use in the AI Disclosure Statement.

For Reviewers

Reviewers who wish to use AI tools must first communicate with the associate editor about how they plan to use these tools in their review. Any tool proposed must allow complete human oversight and must not compromise author copyright or the confidentiality of peer review. Approved uses of AI should be noted in the review report.

Note: Uploading text from any manuscript under review to a large language model (LLM), including but not limited to ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft CoPilot, is a violation of the confidentiality of peer review and is not permitted.

References

COPE: Authorship and AI tools. c2024. Hampshire (UK): Committee on Publication Ethics; [accessed 2024 Oct 3]. https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/ai-author

MIT Libraries: Citing AI tools: home. July 2024. Cambridge (MA): Massachusetts Institute of Technology; [accessed 2024 Oct 3]. https://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=1353444&p=9991326

MIT Libraries: Citing AI tools: Saving AI content for replication and citations. July 2024. Cambridge (MA): Massachusetts Institute of Technology; [accessed 2024 Oct 3]. https://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=1353444&p=9994954

 The Journal of Black Military Studies AI policy is adapted from a UVM Press-authored original policy, which was used with permission.