All studies must be conducted to a high ethical standard and must adhere to local regulations and standards for gaining scrutiny and approval.

 

The work described in your article must have been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/; EC Directive 86/609/EEC for animal experiments http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/lab_animals/legislation_en.htm. Clinical trials should be registered in publicly accessible registries, before participants are enrolled. Further information could be found at the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE) http://www.publicationethics.org. This must be stated at an appropriate point in the article. If you have queries or concerns which aren’t answered by referring to the above websites, or contact the editor of the journal.

 

Informed consent and patient details

Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent, which should be documented in the paper. Appropriate consents, permissions and releases must be obtained where an author wishes to include case details or other personal information or images of patients and any other individuals in the publication. Written consents must be retained by the author but copies should not be provided to the journal. Only if specifically requested by the journal in exceptional circumstances (for example if a legal issue arises) the author must provide copies of the consents or evidence that such consents have been obtained. Unless you have written permission from the patient (or, where applicable, the next of kin), the personal details of any patient included in any part of the article and in any supplementary materials (including all illustrations and videos) must be removed before submission.

 

Conflict of Interest

All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work. Further information and an example of a Conflict of Interest form can be found at: http://www.icmje.org/conflicts-of-interest/.