Publication Ethics

The journal is committed to meeting and upholding standards of ethical behavior at all stages of the publication process. We follow closely the industry associations, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), that set standards and provide guidelines for best practices in order to meet these requirements.

Ethics approval documentation

Research involving human participants, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A clear statement, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate, must appear in the method part of all manuscripts reporting such research. If authors declared that his study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, and this exemption should also be stated in the proper part of the manuscript. Editors may contact authors for further information and documentation to support this, it should be made available to the Editor on request. And editors have the right to reject manuscripts if they consider the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. The editors may also contact the ethics committee for further information, if necessary.

Retrospective ethics approval

If a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing, retrospective ethics approval usually cannot be obtained and it may not be possible to consider the manuscript for peer review. The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the Editor's discretion.

Consent to participate

For all research involving human participants, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the declaration part of the manuscript.

Research involving animals

Experimental research on vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee (e.g., Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee). Evidence for approval must be supplied by the authors on demand. Animal experimental procedures should be as humane as possible and the details of anesthetics and analgesics used should be clearly stated. The ethical standards of experiments must be in accordance with the guidelines (Basel Declaration, etc). Any manuscript describing a study that used animal subjects must include a statement in the Materials and Methods section (or text describing the experimental procedures) that affirms all appropriate measures were taken to minimize pain or discomfort, and details of the animals’ care should be provided.

Conflict of interests

Conflict of interests may be financial or non-financial. A competing interest exists when the authors’ interpretation of data or presentation of information may be influenced by, or may be perceived to be influenced by, their personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations. A conflict-of-interest statement is required for all article and study types. In the interests of transparency and helping reviewers to assess any potential bias in a study’s design, interpretation of it results or presentation of its scientific/medical content, the Journal requires all authors of each paper to declare any conflicting interests (including but not limited to commercial, personal, political, intellectual, or religious interests) in the title page that are related to the work submitted for consideration of publication. In addition, reviewers are required to indicate any potential conflicting interests they might have related to any particular paper they are asked to review.

In addition, editorial board members including editors may also involved in the conflict of interests. They should be excluded from the peer review process as well as from handling manuscripts in cases where there is a competing interest. A declaration should also be added for this.

Author Contributions

Generally, the journal follows CRediT rule. Journals mandating CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) will enable authors to provide information on submission, allowing for detailed information about individual contributions to the work. The submitting author is responsible for ensuring that contributions of all authors are correct. It is expected that all authors will have reviewed, discussed and agreed to their individual contributions as shared by the submitting author. The authors’ contribution statement will be published with the final article and should accurately reflect contributions to the work.

An example of an Authors’ Contribution statement:
Author 1 name: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software. Author 2 name: Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation. Author 3 name: Visualization, Investigation. Author 4 name: Supervision. Author 5 name: Software, Validation. Author 6 name: Writing- Reviewing and Editing.

For more information, please see the taxonomy website: https://credit.niso.org/

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an ‘Acknowledgements’ section.

Clinical trial registration

The journal favors registration of clinical trials and is a signatory to the Statement on publishing clinical trials in biomedical journals. The journal would publish clinical trials that have been registered with a clinical trial registry that allows free online access to public. Registration in the following trial registers is acceptable: http://www.ctri.nic.in/; http://www.anzctr.org.au/; http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/; http://isrctn.org/; http://www.trialregister.nl/trialreg/index.asp; and http://www.umin.ac.jp/ctr. This is applicable to clinical trials that have begun enrollment of subjects in or after June 2008. Clinical trials that have commenced enrollment of subjects prior to June 2008 would be considered for publication in the journal only if they have been registered retrospectively with clinical trial registry that allows unhindered online access to public without charging any fees.

The journal is a member of CrossCheck’s plagiarism detection initiative and takes seriously all cases of publication misconduct. Any suspected cases of covert duplicate manuscript submission will be handled as outlined in the COPE guidelines and the Editor may contact the authors’ institution (see detailed policy below).

Plagiarism

Authors must not use the words, figures, or ideas of others without attribution. All sources must be cited at the point they are used, and reuse of wording must be limited and be attributed or quoted in the text.

The journal uses Crossref Similarity Check (iThenticate) to detect submissions that overlap with published and submitted manuscripts.

Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized from a manuscript by other authors, whether published or unpublished, will be rejected and the authors may incur sanctions. Any published articles may need to be corrected or retracted.

Duplicate submission and redundant publication

The journal considers only original content, i.e. articles that have not been previously published. Articles based on content previously made public only on a preprint server, institutional repository, or in a thesis will be considered.

Manuscripts submitted to the journal must not be submitted elsewhere while under consideration and must be withdrawn before being submitted elsewhere. Authors whose articles are found to have been simultaneously submitted elsewhere may incur sanctions.

If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they must cite the previous articles and indicate how their submitted manuscript differs from their previous work. Reuse of the authors’ own words outside the Methods should be attributed or quoted in the text. Reuse of the authors’ own figures or substantial amounts of wording may require permission from the copyright holder and the authors are responsible for obtaining this.

The journal will consider extended versions of articles published at conferences provided this is declared in the cover letter, the previous version is clearly cited and discussed, there is significant new content, and any necessary permissions are obtained.

Redundant publication, the inappropriate division of study outcomes into more than one article (also known as salami slicing), may result in rejection or a request to merge submitted manuscripts, and the correction of published articles. Duplicate publication of the same, or a very similar, article may result in the retraction of the later article and the authors may incur sanctions.

Citation manipulation

Authors whose submitted manuscripts are found to include citations whose primary purpose is to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, may incur sanctions.

Editors and reviewers must not ask authors to include references merely to increase citations to their own or an associate’s work, to the journal, or to another journal they are associated with.

Fabrication and falsification

The authors of submitted manuscripts or published articles that are found to have fabricated or falsified the results, including the manipulation of images, may incur sanctions, and published articles may be retracted.

Corrections and retractions

In line with the journal’s policy, corrections to, or retractions of, published articles will be made by publishing a Correction or a Retraction note bidirectionally linked to the original article.

Changes to published articles that affect the interpretation and conclusion of the article, but do not fully invalidate the article, will, at the Editor(s)’ discretion, be corrected via publication of a Correction that is indexed and bidirectionally linked to the original article.

On rare occasions, when the interpretation or conclusion of an article is substantially undermined, it may be necessary for published articles to be retracted. The journal will follow the COPE guidelines in such cases. Retraction notices are indexed and bidirectionally linked to the original article. The original article is watermarked as retracted and the title is amended with the prefix “Retracted article:”