Competing interests
A competing interest exists when
professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the
validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain -
employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert-
testimony or personal relationship). There is nothing unethical about a competing interest
but it should be acknowledged and clearly stated. All authors must declare all competing
interests in their covering letter and in “Competing Interests” section at the
end of the manuscript file (before the references). Authors with no competing interests to
declare should obviously state that.
The policy of Tabriz University of Medical
Sciences (TUOMS) is that none of the editors should have any financial relationship with any
biomedical company.
Ethical approval of research/Publication
Ethics
All journals of TUOMS adhere to the guidelines presented by the Committee on
Publication Ethics (
COPE ) and its Best Practice
Guidelines .
We strongly consider allegations of
publication misconduct, both before and after publication, and we reserve the right to
contact authors' institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if needed. If we find
conclusive evidence of misconduct, we will take steps to correct the scientific record,
which may include supplying a correction or retraction.
Authors are expected to be aware of
publication ethics, specifically with regard to authorship, dual submission, plagiarism,
figure manipulation, competing interests, and compliance with standards of research ethics.
In cases of suspected misconduct, we will follow COPE standards and practices and may seek
advice from the COPE forum if needed.
Statement of Ethics Approval
We require every research article
submitted to include a statement that the study obtained ethics approval (or a statement
that it was not required and why), including the name of the ethics committee(s) or
institutional review board(s), the number/ID of the approval(s), and a statement that
participants gave informed consent before taking part. Even when a study has been approved
by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, editors may ask authors for
more detailed information about the ethics of the work.
Patient consent and confidentiality
Any article that contains personal medical
information about an identifiable living individual requires the patient’s explicit
consent before we can publish it. We would like the patient to sign our consent form, which
requires the patient to have read the article.
If consent cannot be obtained because the
patient cannot be traced then publication will be possible only if the information can be
sufficiently anonymized. Anonymization means that neither the patient nor anyone else could
identify the patient with certainty.
If the patient is dead, the authors should
seek permission from a relative (as a matter of courtesy and medical ethics). If the
relatives are not contactable we will balance the worthwhileness of the case, the likelihood
of identification, and the likelihood of offence if identified in making a decision on
whether we should publish without a relative’s consent.
Our policy on obtaining consent for
publication of pictures of patients is a subset of our general policy on patient
confidentiality. If there is any chance that a patient may be identified from a photograph
or other image or from its legend or accompanying text we need the patient’s written
consent to publication by TUOMS.
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
patient’s identity through clinical or personal detail.
Research reporting guidelines
Authors are encouraged to use the relevant
research reporting guidelines for the study type provided by the EQUATOR Network . This will
ensure that you provide enough information for editors, peer reviewers and readers to
understand how the research was performed and to judge whether the findings are likely to be
reliable.
The key reporting guidelines are:
Clinical trial registration
Based on the recommendations by International Committe of Medical Journal Editors
(
ICMJE)
, a clinical trial is defined as “any research project that prospectively
assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent
comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a
health-related intervention and a health outcome”.
In agreement with the
ICMJE
, journals published by TUOMS will not consider reports of clinical trials unless
registered prospectively before recruitment of any participants.
Trial Registration
As a condition of consideration for
publication, journals published by TUOMS require registration of all trials in a public
trials registry that is acceptable to the ICMJE (any registry that is a primary register of
the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform
www.who.int/ictrp /network/primary/en/index.html or in ClinicalTrials.gov, which is a data provider to
the WHO ICTRP).
Plagiarism detection
Journals published by TUOMS use
iThenticate software, which is a plagiarism detector service that verifies the originality
of content submitted before publication. If plagiarism is identified, we will follow COPE guidelines .
Plagiarism includes, but is not limited
to:
- Directly copying text from other
sources
- Copying ideas, images, or data from
other sources
- Reusing text from your own previous
publications
- Using an idea from another source
with slightly modified language
If plagiarism is detected during the peer
review process, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication,
we reserve the right to issue a correction or retract the paper, as appropriate. We reserve
the right to inform authors' institutions about plagiarism detected either before or after
publication.