Editorial Ethics
Data Reliability. In compliance with their ethical obligations, researchers are responsible for the reliability and objectivity of the information they communicate.
Authorship.All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. Authorship credit should be based on:
1. Substantial contributions to conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data;
2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
3. Final approval of the version to be published.
Acquisition of funding, collection of data for the article, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.
All contributors who do not qualify for authorshipshould be accuratelylisted with their consent in the “Acknowledgements” section.
The order of authorship should be a joint decision of the coauthors.
Conflict of interest. Conflict of interest arises when one of the participants (author, reviewer, or editor) has certain obligations that may inappropriately influence (bias) his or her opinion. The most frequent cause of conflict of interest is financial relationships. There may be other reasons — personal relationships, academic competition, administrative subordination.
All participants in the peer review and publication process must disclose all relationships that could be viewed as presenting a potential conflict of interest.
Protection of patients' rights and confidentiality. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed. Disclosure of personal data is permitted only with the patient’s consent. Identifying information, including names, initials, hospital numbers, or case details should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees unless the patient gives written informed consent for publication. Authors should submit to the editor the patient’s written consent for distribution of information and include a corresponding statement in the article footnotes.
Protection of human and animal research subjects. When reporting experiments on human participants, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in compliance with the national and the intra-institutional regulations, policies, and principles covering all aspects of the care and use of laboratory animals.
Multiple publications. The Editorial Board does not consider manuscripts that have been submitted simultaneously to more than one journal, ormanuscripts reporting works that have already been reported in large part in published articles or are contained in or closely related to other papers that have been submitted or accepted for publication elsewhere, including any other print or electronic media. This policy does not prevent the Journal from considering an article not accepted for publication elsewhere or a complete report that follows publication of a preliminary report, such as a preprint or an abstract or a paper that was presented at a scientific meeting or a professional conference but was not published in full.
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For more information on ethical issues, please refer to the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals”, issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. The current version of the document is available at www.ICMJE.org.