Purpose and scope
ELT Pub publishes explanatory and critical writing on generative AI in education and research, on research metrics and publishing integrity, and on the practical decisions those subjects force on working researchers. This policy governs every article and every tool description on the site.
Authorship
Every article carries a named human author, a publication date, and, where revised, a last-updated date. Articles are written by Dr. Ngo Cong-Lem unless a byline says otherwise. Guest contributions appear under the contributor's own name with a short statement of their background. There are no pseudonymous, house-name, or unattributed articles on this site.
The role of generative AI
This site is about generative AI, so its own use of the technology should be legible rather than implied.
- What AI is used for: drafting scaffolds and outlines, copy-editing and tightening prose, generating and reviewing code for the tools, producing decorative imagery, and acting as an adversarial reader against a finished argument.
- What AI is not used for: generating factual claims, inventing or supplying citations, forming the editorial judgements in an article, or producing any article published without a human author having verified its content line by line.
No article is published because a model produced it. A human decides what is worth saying, checks that it is true, and signs it. Claims that originated in a model draft are verified against primary sources before publication, on the working assumption that a fluent sentence is not evidence of anything.
Sourcing
- Factual claims are traced to a primary source wherever one exists: the peer-reviewed article, the dataset, the policy document, or the indexing service's own documentation.
- Where evidence is contested, thin, or preliminary, the article says so rather than choosing a side for narrative convenience.
- Where something is the author's professional judgement rather than an established finding, it is marked as judgement.
- Anecdote is labelled as anecdote and is never presented as evidence of an effect.
Corrections
Errors are corrected openly. The scale of the fix determines the response:
| Type | How it is handled |
|---|---|
| Typographic | Fixed silently. No meaning is affected. |
| Clarification | Wording sharpened where it was open to misreading; the last-updated date changes. |
| Correction | A factual error is fixed and a dated note is appended stating what was wrong and what it now says. The original error is described, not erased. |
| Retraction | Where a central claim proves unsupportable, the article is marked retracted and kept in place with an explanation. Retracting by deletion is not an option. |
Corrections can be requested at ngoconglem@gmail.com, and they are prioritised over other correspondence.
Tool standards
The tools are held to the same standards as the writing:
- Data sources are named, with their vintage and update cadence stated.
- Known limitations are published alongside the tool, not buried in a footnote.
- Where an identification is uncertain, the interface shows that uncertainty rather than resolving it silently — an ambiguous journal name produces no badge in preference to a guessed one.
- No tool issues a verdict on a journal's legitimacy. Tools surface signals; readers and their institutions make judgements.
The reasoning behind these constraints is set out in the disclaimer.
Independence and conflicts of interest
ELT Pub is funded solely by its founder. It receives no sponsorship, payment, or consideration from any publisher, indexing service, university, or software vendor, and it has no commercial relationship with the organisations whose data it reports.
Where an article discusses a journal in which the author has published, an editorial role he holds, or a tool he built, that interest is declared in the article itself. The author's university affiliations are stated for context and do not imply institutional endorsement of anything published here.
Advertising and editorial separation
Advertising, where present, offsets hosting costs. It is visually distinct from editorial content and labelled as advertising. Advertisers receive no advance sight of articles, no influence over topics or conclusions, and no ability to affect tool output. No article is written to attract advertising, and none is altered or withdrawn because of it. ELT Pub does not publish sponsored posts, paid reviews, paid links, or affiliate content.
Reader contributions
Suggestions, corrections, and article proposals are welcome through the contact page. Contributions are edited for clarity and checked against this policy before publication, and contributors keep authorship of their work.