In the medical publication, a conflict of interest (COI) happens when an author has financial or other relationships influencing the author’s decisions, work, or manuscript. COI may occur in various forms such as financial ties, academic commitments, personal relationships, political or religious beliefs, and institutional affiliations. In managing COI, The publications abide by the policy statement of the WAME. All authors should declare their COI, if any, during the manuscript submission. Additionally, reviewers and editors are requested to announce their COI when they agree to take a manuscript for reviewing and handling, respectively. Reviewers and Editors with COI will be excepted from the manuscript process. All authors must declare all competing interests on their title page. Further information can be found at the following links:
Publications expect the highest ethical standards from their authors, reviewers, and editors when conducting research, submitting papers, and throughout the peer-review process.
Statement of Ethics Approval:
Manuscripts of any type submitted must include a statement that the study’s protocol has obtained ethics approval (or a statement that ethics approval does not apply including the reason/reasons), accompanying the number/ID of the approval(s), the name of the ethics committee(s) or institutional review board(s), as well as a statement that participants provided informed consent to participate in the study at enrollment. Even when a study has been ratified by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, editors are likely to request authors further information regarding the ethical aspects of their study.
Human and animal ethics:
Authors reporting experimental studies on human subjects must include an ethical approval statement on the Title page indicating (a) informed consent was taken from all patients enrolled in the study and (b) the study protocol conforms to the ethical guidelines of the
1975 Declaration of Helsinki as reflected in a priori approval by the institution's human research committee. For protecting the safety of individuals who participate in the study, academic and funding organizations
require any study including human participants be approved by an institutional review board (IRB) or ethics review committee. In studies involving animal experimentations, all criteria highlighted in the "
Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals" should be addressed.
Patient Consent:
The protection of a patient's right in a scientific publication is essential. Any article submitted to the journal including personal medical material about an identifiable living individual needs patient’s consent before it is published. Therefore, all participants are required to sign an informed consent form after reading the study’s information sheet. Before signing a consent form, the purpose of all procedures and their possible harms must be completely clarified to all patients who participate in the study. Participants should voluntarily agree to such participation. Nevertheless, informed consent forms should be sent online for advance review.
If consent cannot be obtained because the patient cannot be traced in a study, then publication will be possible only if the information can be sufficiently anonymized. Anonymization means that neither the person nor anyone else could identify the individual with certainty.
If the patient is dead, the authors should track permission from a relative. If the relatives are not contactable, the journals will balance the worthwhileness of the case, the likelihood of identification, and the likelihood of an illegal act in the decision to publish a submitted paper.
Images-such as x-rays, laparoscopic images, ultrasound images, pathology slides, or images of undistinctive parts of the body-may be used without consent so long as they are anonymized by the removal of any identifying marks and are not accompanied by text that could reveal the patients’ identity.