Publication Ethics
Best Practices in Publication
Advanced Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Letters (AdvPBL) firmly upholds the COPE’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, COPE’s Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, WAME’s Publication Ethics Policies for Medical Journals, and WAME’s Recommendations on Chatbots, Generative AI, and Scholarly Manuscripts. Therefore, all authors, reviewers and the editorial board are obligated to conduct themselves ethically following the above guidelines.
Authorship
Authors are expected to adopt the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the research output. AdvPBL adopts the standard criteria for authorship as defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and WAME’s Publication Ethics Policies for Medical Journals. Contributing authors in a manuscript must meet the set criteria.
To give appropriate credit to each author, we require that the individual contributions of authors should be specified in the manuscript. An author is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not usually justify authorship. According to the ICMJE guidelines, to qualify as an author one should have:
(i) made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data.
(ii) been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
(iii) given final approval of the version to be published. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content; and
(iv) agreed 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.
Authors should understand that removal or addition of any name of an author cannot be made after acceptance of a manuscript.
Transparency in Publication
Advanced Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Letters maintains high integrity by following the COPE’s Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. The journal follows the above recommended guidelines in dealing with any allegation of research misconduct related to a published paper. There can be a correction, retraction, expression of concern, if, upon investigation, the ethical concern is established to be true. The journal takes adequate measures to unravel or prevent the publication of articles in which misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data fabrication.
Publication Malpractice: Duplicate publication
Any manuscript submitted to this journal for review must be original and the manuscript, or substantial parts of it, must not be under consideration by any other journal. Generally, the manuscript must not already have been formally published in any journal or in any other citable form. If the abstract of the manuscript has been published previously, the same title earlier published must not be used. In any case where there is the potential for overlap or duplication, we require transparency of authors. Authors are expected to declare any potentially overlapping publications on submission and any overlapping publications should be cited. Articles “in press” and unpublished work should not be cited.
We do not accept plagiarized work and we take seriously all cases of publication misconduct. Any suspected cases of covert duplicate manuscript submission will be handled as outlined in the COPE guidelines and we endorse the policies of ICMJE guidelines in relation to overlapping publications.
Corrections and Retractions
On rare occasions, it may be necessary for us to publish corrections to, or retractions of, articles published in this journal, in order to maintain the integrity of the academic record.
Correction or retraction of any published article will be made by publishing an Erratum or a Retraction article and adding a prominent link to the Erratum/Retraction article. For PDF files of retracted articles, the word “Retracted” will be marked clearly on the article. It is only in the exceptional event where that material is considered to infringe certain rights or is defamatory that we may have to remove it from our site and archive sites. We follow the COPE guidelines.
Financial Disclosure
AdvPBL follows ICMJE’s guidance on Disclosure of Financial and Non-Financial Relationships and Activities. The contributing authors are required to disclose any form of financial support received in support of the research and publication of the work.
Use of AI in manuscript preparation
AdvPBL recognizes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other automated tools can support various aspects of scholarly publishing. However, their use must uphold the principles of research integrity, transparency, accountability, and confidentiality. This policy applies to authors, peer reviewers, editors, and the journal's editorial office. The details of the journal's AI use are described.
Competing Interests
We require authors to declare all competing interests in relation to their research work following the guidelines. All submitted manuscripts must include a ‘competing interests’ section at the end of the manuscript listing all competing interests, whether financial or non-financial. A competing interest exists when the authors’ interpretation of data or presentation of information may be influenced by their personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations.
Where authors have no competing interests, the statement should read “The author(s) declare(s) that they have no competing interests”.
Acknowledgements
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship may be listed in an ‘Acknowledgements’ section. The source of funding should also be acknowledged. For research grants, the name of the funding body and the grant number may be specified, as appropriate.
Any involvement of scientific (medical) writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be acknowledged as described in the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) guidelines.
Data Availability
Submission of a manuscript to this journal indicates that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality. Authors can make their research data publicly available following the guidelines by STM Statement on Data and Databases. The author(s) must preserve the research raw data for a reasonable period after publication. They can share their raw data on existing databases such as Harvard Dataverse and preprint servers.
Copyright and Licensing
The copyright and licensing policies of the journal are specified.
Standards of Reporting
We also strongly recommend that authors should adhere to the minimum reporting guidelines for health research hosted by the EQUATOR Network when preparing their manuscript, and the BioSharing Portal for reporting checklists for biological and biomedical research, where applicable.
We advocate complete and transparent reporting of biomedical and biological research work. You may refer to the Minimum standards of reporting checklist when reporting your research. Authors should adhere to these guidelines when drafting their manuscript, and peer reviewers will be asked to refer to these checklists when evaluating such studies.
Authors of systematic reviews should also provide a link to an additional file from the ‘methods’ section, which reproduces all details of the search strategy. An example of how a search strategy should be presented can be seen in the Cochrane Reviewers Handbook.
Statistical Methods
Authors are advised to include complete information on the statistical methods and measures used in their research, including justification of the appropriateness of the statistical test used. For p values, the number of tails reported (2-tailed or 1-tailed) should be specified.
Ethical Approvals
Studies involving human subjects
Human experiments should be performed only in accordance with the ethical standards provided by the responsible committee of the institution and in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (as revised in Edinburgh 2000). All such experiments must have been approved by the relevant institutional ethical committee and should be in compliance with national and international guidelines. As a minimum, there should be a statement in the Methods section stating the name of the ethics committee or institutional review board as well as the ethical approval number. In addition, all investigations on human subjects must include a statement that the subject gave an informed consent. Patient anonymity should be preserved. Photographs need to be cropped sufficiently to prevent human subjects being recognized. The corresponding author should be ready to provide any further information and documentation to support this to the Editor on request. The Editor may contact the ethics committee for further information if necessary. A manuscript may be rejected if the Editor considers that the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework.
Informed Consent
For all research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from all participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript.
Non-experimental Studies
Field studies and other non-experimental research involving humans must also comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee.
Animal Studies
Research work involving vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The fundamental principles to adhere to are outlined in Basel Declaration while the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) has also published ethical guidelines. Animal experiments should be in accordance with the instructions for the care and use provided by the institution at which the research was carried out. A statement detailing compliance with relevant guidelines and/or ethical approval (including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number, as appropriate) must be included in the manuscript. If a study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript (including the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption and the reasons for the exemption).
For experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also document informed consent from the client or owner and adherence to a high standard (best practice) of veterinary care.
Field studies and other non-experimental research on animals must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement detailing compliance with relevant guidelines and/or appropriate permissions or licenses must be included in the manuscript.
Research involving plants
Experimental research involving plants must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines. Field studies should be conducted in accordance with local legislation, and the manuscript should include a statement specifying the appropriate permissions and/or licenses. For each plant, the voucher specimen must be deposited in a public herbarium or other public collection providing access to deposited material, and information on the voucher specimen and who identified it must be included in the manuscript.
Biological Materials
We strongly encourage the deposition of biological materials, such as plasmids, mutant strains, and cell lines, in established public repositories. Authors are required to check the list of known misidentified cell lines maintained by the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC).
