Statement of informed consent
All papers submitted to our Medicine Papers should declare agreement with the following ‘statement of informed consent’. No paper lacking it, will be considered for publication.
Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. All informationwhich could contribute to identify patients, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers,should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, etc., unless the information is essential for
scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives explicit written informed consent for publication.
For this purpose the manuscript should be shown to the patient before publication and specific and explicit informed consent should be obtained. Furthermore, individuals who provide writing assistance should be identified by the authors, and they must disclose the funding source for this assistance.
Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. However, since complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, informed consent should be obtained from each patient involved, if there is any doubt.
If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning, and editors will note that.
Statement of human and animal rights
All papers submitted to our Medicine Papers should declare agreement with the following ‘statement of human and animal rights’. No paper lacking it will be considered for publication.
Papers describing procedures involving humans or animals must include an explicit and easily identifiable statement pointing out that the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 and 2008.
If any doubt exists as to whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must, in primis, explain the rationale for their approach, and then demonstrate that the institutional ethical committee explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors must indicate that the institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed
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