Editorial & Corrections Policy

How articles are written, reviewed, corrected and retracted — including our policy on automated drafting assistance and authorship.

What we publish

Material about the systematics, morphology, ecology, biogeography and conservation of the Melastomataceae, plus documentation for this database. We do not publish press releases, general-interest filler, or content that is not tied to a verifiable source.

• Every factual claim about a taxon is traceable to a published source or to a record in an upstream database.
• Every article drawing on the literature carries its references.
• We do not publish an article about a taxon we cannot substantiate with at least one primary source.

Review before publication

Drafts are reviewed by the curators responsible for the taxa involved. The reviewer checks the identification of the taxa discussed, the accuracy of the nomenclature, and that the stated distribution matches what the occurrence data show. Nothing is published until that check passes.

Authorship and automated assistance

Articles are published under the name of the person or group responsible for them. We do not invent author personas or attribute content to generic names to imply an editorial team that does not exist. Where automated tools assisted with drafting or editing, that is disclosed in the article, and any statement produced with their help is verified against the cited source by a human before publication.

Corrections and retractions

1. Report an error to contact@melastomataceae.org with the page URL and, where possible, the source showing the correct information.
2. Reports are triaged within five working days.
3. Factual corrections are applied to the page, with the date of change recorded in the page metadata.
4. Where an error affects an article's conclusion, the article is rewritten or retracted and the retraction is stated on the page.
5. Errors inherited from an upstream database are reported upstream, and the page notes the discrepancy until it is fixed.

Advertising

Advertising supports hosting and data-processing costs. Advertisers have no involvement in what we publish, and advertising is never placed on pages without substantive content, nor on account, dashboard, administration, editor or error pages.

Data pages

Species, genus and dataset pages are generated by the pipeline described in the methodology page. They are reference records rather than editorial statements, and they are corrected by correcting the underlying data.