These guidelines are intended as a reference for authors and reviewers. JUCMD endeavours to maintain the highest ethical standards for the articles it publishes. To do so, the journal follows established international standards and guidelines on the conduct and publication of health research, including the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

JUCMD considers these guidelines as necessary to make its position known and to provide authors with clear and easily accessible information on the important ethical issues to ensure that their papers are ethically compliant.

Authors’ responsibilities

Papers submitted for consideration for publication to the EMHJ should comply with the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals of the ICMJE.

 Ethical approval

JUCMD expects authors to adhere to the Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects outlined in the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki and CIOMS. For research involving humans, every research article submitted must include a declaration that before carrying out its field work, the study had obtained ethical clearance from a recognized body in the country, for example, the institutional review boards or research ethics committees. Research involving animals are expected to follow the relevant standards of ethical research. If ethical clearance was not considered to be required, a statement indicating the reasons it was not required must be provided. In any case, authors are expected to follow all requirements of ethical conduct of research, reporting of the findings, and preparation of manuscripts.

Participant confidentiality and respect

Manuscripts should be prepared in such a way that they preserve participants’ confidentiality. Authors are expected to obtain an individual’s explicit consent for the use of any personal or medical information that may make the participant identifiable and must ensure the dignity and respect of the participants and their communities in their manuscript.

 Competing interests

JUCMD requires authors to provide details of any competing interests. A competing interest may occur when an author’s personal, family, or institutional interests (e.g. sources of funds, earnings, relationships, etc.) may affect the research, its findings, or publication of the manuscript. JUCMD will not reject a paper solely on the basis of a declared competing interest but will take this into consideration, when assessing a paper and, if considered relevant, including such information in the published paper.

 Funding

JUCMD requires authors to state all sources of funding for their study.

 Clinical trials registration

JUCMD requires registration of clinical trials in national trials registry before undertaking the trial, as a condition of consideration for publication.

 Authorship

JUCMD follows the ICMJE recommendations on authorship credits, which aim to ensure that all and only those who have made material contribution to the research are named as authors. These require that all four of the following criteria be met to be considered an author:

substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND

final approval of the version to be published; AND

agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Every person who meets all four criteria should be identified as an author. Those who meet some, but not all, of these criteria should be included in an acknowledgement. It should be noted that data collection, laboratory testing, data management, acquisition of funds, provision of support for the study, etc. do not qualify (on their own) an individual for being included as an author.

JUCMD expects papers submitted to be original and not already published, accepted for publication, or currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors must affirm this and disclose any papers that overlap with the submitted paper, including paper(s) published in other languages, although translation may occasionally be considered with the agreement of the other journal. Oral presentation of study findings at a conference, or publication of an abstract only in conference proceedings, does not normally prohibit submission of the full paper to JUCMD. Such abstracts should not exceed 500 words.

 Scientific misconduct

JUCMD takes any allegation or evidence of scientific misconduct seriously. Examples of scientific misconduct include:

• Violation of ethical research standards: failing to adhere to standards for research involving humans and animals.
• Fabrication and falsification of data and abuse of accepted research practices such as making up data, deliberately suppressing and/or altering data, and manipulating experiments/analysis to obtain desired results.
• Plagiarism: using the published language or ideas of others without appropriate acknowledgment of the source and representing such ideas as one’s own. When referring to the published ideas/opinions of others, full referencing is expected. Brief quoted statements could be acceptable if good justification is provided and such statements are placed within inverted commas.
• Duplicate publication: this refers to the publication of a paper by at least one of the authors, that overlaps substantially with another one already published, without clear reference to the previous publication. Duplicate publication is considered unethical particularly for original research because it can lead to double-counting of data and inappropriate weighting of the results of a single study.
• Impropriety of authorship: this refers to improperly assigning authorship credit either by inclusion (“guest” authorship) or exclusion (“ghost” authorship).

 

Authors may appeal decisions on their papers if they believe there is good reason or evidence for an appeal. Such appeals will be carefully considered by the editorial team.