Ethics Guidelines
I. Publishing Ethics for Authors
1. Authorship
According to the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) recommendations, authorship must meet the following four criteria: ① Significant contribution to the study's concept or design, or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; ② Drafting the manuscript or critically revising its important intellectual content; ③ Approval of the final version to be published; ④ Agreeing to take full responsibility for the research work and ensuring that any questions regarding the accuracy or integrity of any part of the paper are appropriately investigated and addressed. Contributors who do not meet these criteria should be appreciated in the acknowledgment section. The number and order of authors are determined by the authors and, in principle, should not be changed after submission. Any changes must be agreed upon in writing by all authors. The corresponding author is the person responsible for the authenticity of the submitted manuscript content. For authors from foreign countries or Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, written consent for authorship must be provided.
2. Plagiarism
The following behavior is strictly prohibited: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. (1) fabrication refers to making up data with no basis; (2) falsification refers to using fraudulent means to alter or distort data; (3) plagiarism refers to the act of stealing or modifying other’s work as one's own, completely or partially copying other’s work or changing its form or content, including viewpoint plagiarism, paragraph plagiarism, and full-text plagiarism. Specifically, the following actions are considered academic misconduct: forgery, tampering, improper authorship, multiple submission, duplicate publication, salami publication, violation of ethics principles, etc.
3. Competing Interests
All authors must disclose all potential conflicts of interest, i.e., when the financing/personal status/affiliation of the authors (or the authors' organization/employer) may affect the authors' decision, work or manuscript. When a product is mentioned, the author should also disclose whether there is a conflict of interest against competitive products. If the project is commercially funded and involved in potential conflicts of interest, the Statement of Competing Interests must be provided.
4. Redundant Publishing
To prevent academic misconduct such as plagiarism, data falsification, fabrication, and duplicate submissions, this journal has adopted the "Scientific Journal Academic Misconduct Literature Detection System." Manuscripts with a repetition rate >20% (including dissertations) will be rejected. For manuscripts exhibiting serious misconduct, the journal reserves the right to notify the responsible institutions or authorities. In cases of serious misconduct in published papers, the journal will retract the paper (including both print and online versions), notify the responsible institutions or authorities, and inform other relevant journals.
The journal does not consider manuscripts derived from dissertations as academic misconduct. Publication of dissertation is deemed reasonable under certain circumstances. However, the following guidelines should be observed: ① Authors should promptly note that the manuscript is derived from a dissertation. ② The text repetition rate of manuscripts derived from dissertations should not exceed 20%. ③ The author's affiliation should be the institution that provided the source materials, not the institution where the student worked after graduation. ④ The first author and corresponding author should match those in the original dissertation.
Before the paper is officially published, the authors may not use it for public media promotion. Once published, the paper cannot be used for commercial purposes without written permission from the journal. However, the author may later use parts of the paper in subsequent works, translate it, or include it in non-journal collections edited by the author.
II. Medical Ethics
1. Ethics in Research
The basic principles of medical ethics must be followed. When humans are the subjects of research, the ethical guidelines outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki should be adhered to. Authors must clearly state that their research process has strictly followed the ethical guidelines established by the ethical review committee responsible for human trials at the institutional, regional, or national level, and provide the official approval documents from the committee (with the approval number clearly stated in the paper). In addition, it must be ensured that all participants in the research or their legal representatives have been fully informed and have signed an informed consent form. For animal experiments, authors are required to provide photocopies of the animal production license, animal use license, animal quality certification, and the animal welfare and ethics approval form (three certificates and one form) to prove that the experimental process strictly adheres to laws, regulations, and ethical standards protecting animal rights. Furthermore, for any reporting of innovative treatment methods or surgical techniques, necessary approvals or licenses must be obtained according to legal procedures. The journal reserves the right to request authors to provide, but not be limited to, copies of medical ethics review documents, informed consent forms, research design plans, etc. If the manuscript involves confidential issues, an approval for publication from relevant authorities must be provided.
2. Privacy Protection
In the writing, authors should place high importance on protecting patient privacy and take effective measures (such as obscuring faces or removing sensitive information) to ensure that the patient's personal identity is not disclosed. This also applies to specimen images, imaging data, and other materials cited in the paper, where identifiable information such as the patient's name or identification number should be avoided.
3. Standard for Clinical Trial Quality Management
For manuscripts concerning drug efficacy and safety studies that involve the usage outside their approved indications, the research institution of the author must be an accredited clinical trial center and adhere to the principles of Good Clinical Practice (GCP). Please refer to "Good Clinical Practice in Clinical Trials of Drugs" published by the National Medical Products Administration and the National Health Commission in 2021. For related research, the registration institution and registration number should be provided at the end of the article. The Universal Trial Number (UTN) can be applied from one of the Primary Registries in the WHO Registry Network. If applicable, the UTN should be included in the paper.
4. AI-assisted Technology
The use of AI-assisted technologies, including large language models, chatbots, or image generation tools, is prohibited in the methods. If the paper contains content generated using AI-assisted technologies, the authors must declare and confirm that the relevant content has not been published in any other journal, nor is it under submission to other journals. Additionally, the authors must confirm that this content does not involve plagiarism, copyright infringement, or other violations of publication ethics.
5. Multi-center Study and Group Authors
Any multi-center collaborative research involving human subjects must be registered as a clinical trial, with the corresponding author taking responsibility for this process. There must be at least one corresponding author who guarantees the authenticity of the paper and is responsible for arranging the authorship and the order of authors.
6. Authenticity
All authors are responsible for the authenticity of the ethical approval, clinical trials, funding projects, and their associated numbers mentioned in the paper, and these should be relevant to the content of the paper.
III. Ethics for Editors and Reviewers
Reviewers and Editors Responsibility: Reviewers and editors should follow the following standards in their work:
1. Reviewers and editors must process manuscripts fairly and impartially. The selection criteria should be only based on quality, innovation, scientificity, practicality, and the requirement of the publishing scope.
2. Reviewers and editors should keep the manuscript content, author information and review comment confidential.
3. Reviewers and editors should respect the research achievements of authors and should not disclose or use data of unpublished articles without authorization.
4. If any academic misconduct is found in the manuscript, reviewers and editors shall handle the case impartially.
5. If there is a conflict of interest, reviewers and editors should report it to the editorial office or the editorial board and avoid handling the manuscript.
IV. Advertisement Policy
This journal does not accept advertising. No commercial advertisements will be published in the journal or on the journal’s official website.
V. Intellectual Property and Open Science
The editorial office strives to respect the protection of intellectual property and requires editors, authors, and reviewers to do so. Any potential infringement should be avoided. Third-party infringement on the intellectual property of the journal is prohibited. On the premise of intellectual property protection, the journal encourages the practice of open science. Authors are encouraged to publish or share their research data whenever appropriate. The data for sharing may include original data, observation records, experimental results, etc. The journal also encourages the sharing of software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods, and other useful materials. Authors can upload the materials above to an accessible third-party repository and make a proper citation or add a link at the end of the article.
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