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.

Authorship

The journal request authors to fulfil the criteria below: Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; or have drafted the work or substantively revised it. All authors should approve the submission, agree their contributions stated in the manuscript, and admit others contributions as proper authors.

Acknowledgements

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