Ethical standards and procedures
Declarations
All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':
- Data availability
See the Data sharing section below and our data sharing policy.
- Consent for publication
We often find that authors have confused consent for publication with consent for participation in their study. For the purpose of this document, "consent" refers to consent to publish personal information about an individual, and not informed consent for participation in a study.
- Use of AI and AI-assisted technology
See the Data sharing section below and our AI policy.
If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section.
Research involving human subjects
When reporting on research that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, authors must declare that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975 (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/), revised in 2013. According to point 23 of this declaration, an approval from the local institutional review board (IRB) or other appropriate ethics committee must be obtained before undertaking the research to confirm the study meets national and international guidelines. As a minimum, a statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board must be stated in Section ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’ of the article.
Example of an ethical statement: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)."
For non-interventional studies (e.g. surveys, questionnaires, social media research), all participants must be fully informed if the anonymity is assured, why the research is being conducted, how their data will be used and if there are any risks associated. As with all research involving humans, ethical approval from an appropriate ethics committee must be obtained prior to conducting the study. If ethical approval is not required, authors must either provide an exemption from the ethics committee or are encouraged to cite the local or national legislation that indicates ethics approval is not required for this type of study. Where a study has been granted exemption, the name of the ethics committee which provided this should be stated in Section ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’ with a full explanation regarding why ethical approval was not required.
A written informed consent for publication must be obtained from participating patients. Data relating to individual participants must be described in detail, but private information identifying participants need not be included unless the identifiable materials are of relevance to the research (for example, photographs of participants’ faces that show a particular symptom). Patients’ initials or other personal identifiers must not appear in any images. For manuscripts that include any case details, personal information, and/or images of patients, authors must obtain signed informed consent for publication from patients (or their relatives/guardians) before submitting to an MDPI journal. Patient details must be anonymized as far as possible, e.g., do not mention specific age, ethnicity, or occupation where they are not relevant to the conclusions. Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.
You may refer to our sample form and provide an appropriate form after consulting with your affiliated institution. For the purposes of publishing in Adv Clin Exp Med, a consent, permission, or release form should include unlimited permission for publication in all formats (including print, electronic, and online), in sublicensed and reprinted versions (including translations and derived works), and in other works and products under open access license. To respect patients’ and any other individual’s privacy, please do not send signed forms. The journal reserves the right to ask authors to provide signed forms if necessary.
If the study reports research involving vulnerable groups, an additional check may be performed. The submitted manuscript will be scrutinized by the editorial office and upon request, documentary evidence (blank consent forms and any related discussion documents from the ethics board) must be supplied. Additionally, when studies describe groups by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, disease, etc., explanation regarding why such categorization was needed must be clearly stated in the article.
Ethical guidelines for the use of animals in research
The editors will require that the benefits potentially derived from any research causing harm to animals are significant in relation to any cost endured by animals, and that procedures followed are unlikely to cause offense to the majority of readers. Authors should particularly ensure that their research complies with the commonly-accepted '3Rs':
- Replacement of animals by alternatives wherever possible,
- Reduction in number of animals used, and
- Refinement of experimental conditions and procedures to minimize the harm to animals.
Authors must include details on housing, husbandry and pain management in their manuscript.
For further guidance authors should refer to the Code of Practice for the Housing and Care of Animals Used in Scientific Procedures, American Association for Laboratory Animal Science or European Animal Research Association.
If national legislation requires it, studies involving vertebrates or higher invertebrates must only be carried out after obtaining approval from the appropriate ethics committee. As a minimum, the project identification code, date of approval and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be stated. Research procedures must be carried out in accordance with national and institutional regulations. Statements on animal welfare should confirm that the study complied with all relevant legislation. Authors are responsible for correctness of the statements provided in the manuscript.
If ethical approval is not required by national laws, authors must provide an exemption from the ethics committee, if one is available. Where a study has been granted exemption, the name of the ethics committee that provided this should be stated with a full explanation on why the ethical approval was not required.
If no animal ethics committee is available to review applications, authors should be aware that the ethics of their research will be evaluated by reviewers and editors. Authors should provide a statement justifying the work from an ethical perspective, using the same utilitarian framework that is used by ethics committees. Authors may be asked to provide this even if they have received ethical approval.
Adv Clin Exp Med endorses the ARRIVE guidelines (arriveguidelines.org/) for reporting experiments using live animals. Authors and reviewers must use the ARRIVE guidelines as a checklist, which can be found at https://arriveguidelines.org/sites/arrive/files/documents/ARRIVE%20Compliance%20Questionnaire.pdf. Editors reserve the right to ask for the checklist and to reject submissions that do not adhere to these guidelines, to reject submissions based on ethical or animal welfare concerns or if the procedure described does not appear to be justified by the value of the work presented.
- NSW Department of Primary Industries and Animal Research Review Panel. Three Rs. Available online: https://www.animalethics.org.au/three-rs
- Home Office. Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. Code of Practice for the Housing and Care of Animals Bred, Supplied or Used for Scientific Purposes. Available online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/388535/CoPanimalsWeb.pdf
- American Association for Laboratory Animal Science. The Scientific Basis for Regulation of Animal Care and Use. Available online: https://www.aalas.org/about-aalas/position-papers/scientific-basis-for-regulation-of-animal-care-and-use
- European Animal Research Association. EU regulations on animal research. Available online: https://www.eara.eu/animal-research-law
Research involving cell lines
Methods sections for submissions reporting on research with cell lines should state the origin of any cell lines. For established cell lines the provenance should be stated and references must also be given to either a published paper or to a commercial source. If previously unpublished de novo cell lines were used, including those gifted from another laboratory, details of institutional review board or ethics committee approval must be given, and confirmation of written informed consent must be provided if the line is of human origin.
An example of Ethical Statements:
The HCT116 cell line was obtained from XXXX. The MLH1+ cell line was provided by XXXXX, Ltd. The DLD-1 cell line was obtained from Dr. XXXX. The DR-GFP and SA-GFP reporter plasmids were obtained from Dr. XXX and the Rad51K133A expression vector was obtained from Dr. XXXX.
Clinical trials registration
Registration
Adv Clin Exp Med follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines which require and recommend registration of clinical trials in a public trials registry at or before the time of first patient enrollment as a condition of consideration for publication.
Purely observational studies do not require registration. A clinical trial not only refers to studies that take place in a hospital or involve pharmaceuticals, but also refer to all studies which involve participant randomization and group classification in the context of the intervention under assessment.
Authors are strongly encouraged to pre-register clinical trials with an international clinical trials register and cite a reference to the registration in the Methods section. Suitable databases include clinicaltrials.gov, the EU Clinical Trials Register and those listed by the World Health Organisation International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.
Approval to conduct a study from an independent local, regional, or national review body is not equivalent to prospective clinical trial registration. Adv Clin Exp Med reserves the right to decline any paper without trial registration for further peer-review. However, if the study protocol has been published before the enrolment, the registration can be waived with correct citation of the published protocol.
CONSORT statement
Adv Clin Exp Med requires a completed CONSORT 2010 checklist and flow diagram as a condition of submission when reporting the results of a randomized trial. Templates for these can be found here or on the CONSORT website (http://www.consort-statement.org) which also describes several CONSORT checklist extensions for different designs and types of data beyond two group parallel trials. At minimum, your article should report the content addressed by each item of the checklist.
Sex and gender in research
We encourage our authors to follow the ‘Sex and Gender Equity in Research – SAGER – guidelines’ and to include sex and gender considerations where relevant. Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms. Article titles and/or abstracts should indicate clearly what sex(es) the study applies to. Authors should also describe in the background, whether sex and/or gender differences may be expected; report how sex and/or gender were accounted for in the design of the study; provide disaggregated data by sex and/or gender, where appropriate; and discuss respective results. If a sex and/or gender analysis was not conducted, the rationale should be given in the Discussion.
Borders and territories
Potential disputes over borders and territories may have particular relevance for authors in describing their research or in an author or editor correspondence address, and should be respected. Content decisions are an editorial matter and where there is a potential or perceived dispute or complaint, the editorial team will attempt to find a resolution that satisfies parties involved.
Adv Clin Exp Med stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliation.
Image integrity
Images submitted with a manuscript for review should be minimally processed. No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced. The grouping or consolidation of images from multiple sources must be made explicit by the arrangement of the figure and in the figure legend. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if they are applied to the whole image and if they do not obscure, eliminate, or misrepresent any information present in the original, including backgrounds.
Unprocessed data files may be requested to help in manuscript evaluation during the peer review process or may be needed to respond to post-publication issues that may arise with published papers. Unprocessed data and metadata files should be retained, ideally forever.
Authorship and AI tools – COPE position statement
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT or Large Language Models, in research publications is expanding rapidly. COPE joins organisations, such as WAME and the JAMA Network among others, to state that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper.
AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship, as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.
Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.
The above statement has been published by the Committee on Publication Etics (COPE) and is available on the official website of COPE:
Please consult also our guidelines regarding the use of AI and AI-assisted technologies.
Ethical consideration
The authors are required to follow the ethical principles for clinical research based on the Declaration of Helsinki. The Methods section in original articles and research-in-progress should clearly state that the study was approved by an appropriate institutional review board or ethics committee and that patients provided written informed consent to participate in the study. All personal details of patients must be kept confidential.
Papers describing animal experiments can be accepted for publication only if the experiment conforms to the legal requirements in Poland as well as with the European Communities Council Directive as of November 24, 1986 or the National Institute of Health Guide (National Institute of Health Publications No. 80-23, Revised 1978) for the care and use of Laboratory Animals for experimental procedure. Authors must provide a full description of their anesthetics and surgical procedures.
Duties and responsibilities of authors
The Authors are obliged to prepare and send the article in accordance with the requirements set out in Instructions for Authors. Moreover, the Authors are obliged to submit statements which will include: a statement about the originality of the content of the article (work not yet published anywhere), the integrity of the copyrights of others, no conflict of interest or its application, as well as the superior permission to publish an article in the journal. Authors are obliged to participate in peer review process. The Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes, they also should provide a list of references following AMA style guide.
We require the Materials and methods section to provide sufficient detail to allow replication of the study. Study design should be described in detail, and reagent description should facilitate replication (for example, source and purity should be specified, there should be evidence that antibodies have been validated, and cell lines should be authenticated). Statistics must also be comprehensively described, as outlined below. Materials/samples used in the analysis must be made available to any researcher for purposes of directly replicating the procedure. Authors are also expected to honor reasonable (consistent with community standards) requests for research materials/samples to the extent feasible, so that other research groups can extend and advance the results.
Authors are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships that might bias or be seen to bias their work. Authors may, at any time before accepting the article for publication, withdraw the article by submitting a statement in the Editorial System.
Should any conflict of interest arise, it should be reported while submitting the manuscript in a dedicated section of the submission procedure in our Editorial System. More on conflict of interest:
Complaints
If concerns are raised regarding scientific soundness or originality of a published manuscript, or figure manipulation or other forms of misconduct are alleged in a direct email to the editor or publisher, supported by sound evidence, the editor/publisher responds to the person who raised concerns saying that they are going to investigate and will let them know the outcome but will not necessarily be in contact regularly before then. If the evidence is not provided in the initial communication, the editor/publisher requests it. Based on the evidence material, the editor/publisher investigates according to the appropriate COPE flowchart. If there is an outcome to the investigation, such as a correction or retraction, the person who originally raised the concern is informed about the outcome of the case. Concerns raised via social media are treated in the same way as raised directly if evidence is provided in the initial claim or after a request.
Plagiarism and duplicate publications
All manuscripts submitted to Advances in Clinical and Experimental Medicine are checked for plagiarism using Similarity Check, a service enabling editors to screen published and submitted content for originality by providing access to the iThenticate software. Cases of suspected scientific misconduct, including plagiarism and duplicate publications, are handled according to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ Core Practices guidance.
Data falsification/fabrication
Data falsification means manipulating research data with the intention of giving a false impression. This includes manipulating images (e.g. micrographs, gels, radiological images), removing outliers or “inconvenient” results, changing, adding or omitting data points, etc. Suspected fabricated data in a submitted manuscript will be investigated according to the relevant COPE procedure. Suspected fabricated data in a published manuscript will also be dealt with following the appropriate COPE procedure.
Data fabrication is understood as making up research findings. Cases of suspected data fabrication will be investigated according to relevant COPE procedure.
Journal policy on data sharing and reproducibility
All papers submitted to Adv Clin Exp Med since August 15, 2024, will be subject to our new policy concerning data sharing.
Please note that availability of data from the corresponding author on request is no longer an option.
Adv Clin Exp Med requires the Authors of all original papers to make all data necessary to replicate the results of their study publicly available without restriction when the paper is submitted to the journal (relevant information must be registered in the Editorial System at the time of submission). The following provisions apply only to original papers (including research letters). They do not apply to reviews and meta-analyses.
All the data and related metadata underlying the reported findings should be deposited in appropriate public data repositories unless already provided as part of the submitted article. Authors must deposit the data when submitting the paper to the journal. It is not permitted to deposit the dataset after the manuscript has been accepted for publication.
The chosen repository will assign DOI to the deposited dataset - one for the whole dataset, not separate DOIs for each file (should there be multiple files). The most popular repository is [https://zenodo.org/]. The format and number of deposited data files are entirely up to the authors.
Authors are required to provide a Data Availability Statement (DAS) describing compliance with the journal’s data policy. It should occur in the main text of the manuscript, in the final section Declarations, after Conclusions. The statement should include the following information:
The datasets supporting the findings of the current study are openly available in [repository name] at [DOI].
Papers not including any declaration concerning data sharing will not enter peer review until such declaration is provided.
Accordingly, Authors of original papers and research letters should not upload in the Editorial System any supplementary files with relevant data. All supplementary files referred to in the manuscript (supplementary tables, supplementary figures and others) must be a part of the shared dataset deposited in the repository). Even if there are no data to share, any Supplementary files (referred or not referred to in the text) should be deposited in a repository and a single DOI of this deposit should be provided in the data availability statement.
Please be advised that Additional files uploaded into the Editorial System are NOT VISIBLE to the reviewers, while an URL in the Data sharing declaration is available to them.
MORE INFORMATION
https://advances.umw.edu.pl/en/data-sharing
Citation manipulation
Citation manipulation is a problem when references do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article, and are included solely to increase citations. Any party which includes or requests to add citations where the motivations are merely self-promotional violates publication ethics. Cases of suspected citation manipulation will be investigated according to appropriate COPE document.
Duties and responsibilities of reviewers
Articles are selected for publication in double-blind selection system and published in open access mode. Reviewers review manuscripts via Editorial System on the basis of questions prepared by journal’s Editorial Board. It is also possible for a reviewer to send individual comments to be published in the article content. All judgements and findings in the peer-review process should be objective. Reviewers should have no conflict of interest (they make a statement before proceeding to review). Reviewers - if there is a legitimate need - should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited. The articles reviewed by them should be treated confidentially prior to their publication.
Duties and responsibilities of editors
Editors are responsible for deciding which articles are accepted for publication. Editors act in a balanced, objective and fair way while carrying out their expected duties, without discrimination on grounds of gender, sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs, ethnic or geographical origin of the authors. Publisher and Editors are always ready to publish corrections, clarifications, withdrawals and apologies if there is a legitimate need. In the situation when there is a suspicion that an inappropriate research procedure described in the work sent by authors has taken place, the authors are obliged by the Editorial Office - if not yet submitted - to submit information regarding the approval of the described research procedure by a properly established ethics committee to conduct clinical trials.
In-house submissions, i.e. papers authored by Editors or Editorial Board members of the title, will be sent to Editors unaffiliated with the author or institution and monitored carefully to ensure there is no peer review bias.
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
ACEM is a signatory of San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which intends to halt the practice of correlating the journal impact factor to the merits of a specific scientist's contributions. Such practice creates biases and inaccuracies when appraising scientific research. It also states that the impact factor is not to be used as a substitute measure of the quality of individual research articles, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. It has become a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines and all key stakeholders including funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers. We encourage all individuals and organizations who are interested in developing and promoting best practice in the assessment of scholarly research to sign DORA.
Its objectives are:
1. Raise awareness
To call attention to new tools and processes in research assessment and the responsible use of metrics that align with core academic values and promote consistency and transparency in decision-making.
2. Facilitate implementation
To aid development of new policies and practices for hiring, promotion, and funding decisions.
3. Catalyze change
To spread research assessment reform broadly by working across scholarly disciplines and globally.
4. Improve equity
To call for broader representation of researchers in the design of research assessment practices that directly address the structural inequalities in academia.
How Journals and Publishers Can Help to Reform Research Assessment?