Reporting and Research Guidelines

  1. Authors are required to comply with the reporting standards adopted by their field and that apply to their study design.
  2. Authors should specify the standards that they have followed and include this information in the manuscript.

Animal Research

Regulated animal research (which includes all living animals and/or higher vertebrates) should comply with international or local legislation and regulations and should have approval for use of a pertinent organism (in most cases, an IRB or Ethics Committee).

 

Human Research

  1. Human research should comply with international or local legislation and regulations and should have approval for the use of a pertinent organism (in most cases, an IRB or Ethics Committee). Authors should provide an ethics statement in the Materials and Methods section of their manuscript, where information about such approval should be completely described (including the name of the authorizing organization and reference approval numbers). If a reference approval number is not provided, written approval should be provided as a confidential supplementary information file. Any kind of research should have been conducted in accordance to the Helsinki Declaration. If approval was not obtained, the authors should include a statement explaining why such approval was not necessary.
  2. Authors should include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects participating in the study. If such consent was written, a blank or anonymous copy of the informed consent form should be provided as a confidential supplementary information file.
  3. Individual privacy and anonymity should be protected. Information for identification (such as name, photographs, and identification data) should not be included in the manuscript. Exceptions may only be made when there is evidence that the person whose information is included has given explicit consent. Further information about individual privacy, anonymity, and informed consent can be found in the privacy and confidentiality guidelines of ICMJE.