Research Ethics and Reporting Standards

Studies involving people, their data, or their tissue must be approved by an institutional review board or ethics committee and conducted in line with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Authors must state the committee’s name, approval number, and approval date. They must also report how informed consent was obtained or explain why it was waived.

Animal studies require approval from an institutional animal care committee and must follow the ARRIVE 2.0 guidelines.

Clinical trials must be registered in a public registry recognised by the WHO, such as ClinicalTrials.gov, a WHO ICTRP primary registry, or the National Helsinki Committee, before the first participant is enrolled.

Provide the registration number at the end of the abstract.

Every listed author must meet all four ICMJE criteria:

• Make a substantial contribution to the work.
• Draft the manuscript or critically revise it.
• Approve the final version.
• Agree to be accountable for the work.

Describe each author’s role using the CRediT taxonomy. Changes to the author list after submission require a signed request from all authors and the editor’s approval.

All authors must disclose financial and non-financial relationships relevant to the work, using the ICMJE disclosure form.

Name every funding source and provide grant numbers. Describe the funder’s role in the study, or state that the funder had no role.

Include a data availability statement explaining where and how the data supporting the results can be accessed, or why they cannot be shared (for example, because of patient confidentiality).

• AI tools cannot be listed as authors because they cannot take responsibility for the work.
• Any use of generative AI in writing, analysis, or image creation must be described in the Methods or Acknowledgements, naming the tool, version, and purpose.
• Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy of all content, including references.
• Reviewers and editors must not upload manuscripts to generative AI tools, since this breaches confidentiality.

Plagiarism (including self-plagiarism), data fabrication or falsification, image manipulation, duplicate submission, and redundant publication are not accepted.

Suspected cases are handled following COPE guidance and may lead to rejection, retraction, notification of the authors’ institutions, and a ban on future submissions.