Advanced Biomedical Research

Publication Ethics

Read and agree to our editorial policies.

Editorial Policies:

Ethics Policy:

The editors and staff of ABR adhere to the ethical standards established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and are committed to providing authors with a transparent process in the handling of manuscripts received in the editorial office. 

In addition, ABR follows the guidance on editorial independence produced by the World Association of Medical Editors and subscribes to the tenets of reporting guidelines established by the EQUATOR network. ABR supports the policies of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and the following author's instructions follow the ICMJE Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. Manuscript preparation should follow these ICMJE guidelines.

Ethics:

When reporting studies on human beings, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975, as revised in 2013 (available at https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/). For prospective studies involving human participants, authors are expected to mention the approval of (regional/ national/ institutional or independent Ethics Committee or Review Board, obtaining informed consent from adult research participants, and obtaining assent for children over 7 years participating in the trial. The age beyond which assent would be required could vary as per regional and/ or national guidelines. Ensure confidentiality of subjects by desisting from mentioning participants’ names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. When reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether the institutions or a national research council’s guide for or any national law on the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

Evidence for approval by a local Ethics Committee (for both human as well as animal studies) must be supplied by the authors on demand. Animal experimental procedures should be as humane as possible, and the details of anesthetics and analgesics used should be clearly stated. The ethical standards of experiments must be in accordance with the guidelines provided by the CPCSEA and World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki on Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Humans for studies involving experimental animals and human beings, respectively). The journal will not consider any paper which is ethically unacceptable. A statement on ethics committee permission and ethical practices must be included in all research articles under the ‘Materials and Methods section.

Copyrights:

The entire contents of Advnced Biomedical Research journal are protected under Indian and international copyrights. The Journal, however, grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable non-commercial purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship and ownership of the rights. The journal also grants the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal non-commercial use under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International Public License.

Preprints:

ABR has no objections to considering preprints for publication. If an author is submitting a manuscript that has been shared as a preprint, authors should include the preprint server name and DOI on the title page.

Authorship Criteria:

Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to each of the three components mentioned below, and it should be stated on the first page:

  • Concept and design of study or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data
  • Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content
  • Final approval of the version to be published

It should be noted that:

  • Honorary or guest authorship is not acceptable.
  • Co-corresponding authorship is acceptable.
  • Co-first authorship is not acceptable.
  • Acquisition of funding and provision of technical services, patients, or materials, while they may be essential to the work, are not in themselves sufficient contributions to justify authorship.

The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows: study conception and design: X. Author, Y. Author; data collection: Y. Author; analysis and interpretation of results: X. Author, Y. Author. Z. Author; draft manuscript preparation: Y. Author. Z. Author. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

An author name can appear multiple times, and each author name must appear at least once. For single authors, use the following wording: The author confirms sole responsibility for the following: study conception and design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of results, and manuscript preparation.

Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves do not justify authorship. Each contributor should have participated sufficiently to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the manuscript's content. The order of naming the contributors should be based on the relative contribution of the contributor towards the study and writing the manuscript. The author list of any submission should be decided upon and fixed BEFORE submission. Once submitted, the order cannot be changed without the written consent of all the contributors. Please note that electronic signatures or copied and pasted signatures are not acceptable.

Changes to Authorship:

ABR considers the final author list to be complete at the time of the first submission. Please be sure to check that all authors are properly listed on the revision submission; this includes the spelling of an author's name, their designated degrees, and the order of authors listed.

Contribution Details:

Contributors should provide a description of contributions made by each of them towards the manuscript. Description should be divided in following categories, as applicable: concept, design, definition of intellectual content, literature search, clinical studies, experimental studies, data acquisition, data analysis, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, manuscript editing and manuscript review. One or more author should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole from inception to published article and should be designated as 'guarantor'.

Conflicts of Interest/ Competing Interests

All authors of must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with publication of the manuscript or an institution or product that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or is important to the outcome of the study presented. Authors should also disclose conflict of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

Protection of Patients’Right to Privacy

Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian, wherever applicable) gives informed consent for publication. Authors should remove patients' names from figures unless they have obtained informed consent from the patients. The journal abides by ICMJE guidelines:

1) Authors, not the journals nor the publisher, need to obtain the patient consent form before the publication and have the form properly archived. The consent forms are not to be uploaded with the cover letter or sent through email to editorial or publisher offices.

2) If the manuscript contains patient images that preclude anonymity or a description that has an obvious indication of the identity of the patient, a statement about obtaining informed patient consent should be indicated in the manuscript.

Checking for plagiarism, duplicate publication, and text recycling

In the interest of preserving the scientific integrity of all articles published in ABR, starting in January 2012, the Editorial Office will be running all revised manuscripts through an online plagiarism-prevention program. Following the lead of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), whose policies are in turn supported by the ICMJE, if plagiarism is discovered, the author will be notified before any further action is taken. ABR adheres to the process established by COPE, whose guidelines and flowcharts for action are available online at publicationethics.org.

Misconduct

We will energetically pursue accusations of misconduct directed at authors, Editors or referees and have a number of sanctions at our disposal including the option to inform employers about accusations and ask them to mount their own internal investigations. Accusations should not be made lightly or in the absence of the likelihood of supporting evidence being obtainable. The Journal may take the view that accusations are malicious if supporting evidence cannot be found and may direct sanctions against accusers in such cases. Any accusation of misconduct should be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief (unless it involves the Editor-in-Chief, in which case it should be directed to the Chairman of the Advisory Board). ABR is a member of COPE and will follow its guidelines on the handling of investigations into research misconduct.