Ethical Principles and Publication Policy

The Journal of Applied Health Sciences and Medicine (JAHSM), ISSN 2583-1887 is committed to maintaining high standards of research integrity, publication ethics, patient protection, scientific transparency, editorial independence, and responsible medical and health-science publishing.

Authors, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, and the publisher are expected to comply with applicable ethical, scientific, and publication standards throughout the research, submission, peer-review, editorial, production, and post-publication processes.

Publication Ethics Framework

JAHSM's publication-ethics framework is informed by internationally recognized medical and scholarly standards and guidance, including:

The applicable requirements depend on the nature of the research, study design, article type, applicable laws and regulations, institutional requirements, and relevant professional standards.

Research Integrity

Authors are responsible for ensuring that research is conducted and reported honestly, accurately, transparently, and responsibly.

Research findings must not be fabricated, falsified, manipulated, or selectively presented in a manner that misrepresents the research. Authors should provide sufficient methodological information to permit appropriate scientific assessment of the work.

Research Involving Human Participants

Research involving human participants must comply with applicable ethical principles, institutional requirements, national regulations, and internationally recognized standards.

For medical research involving human participants, authors should follow the principles of the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (2024), where applicable.

Where ethical review is required, approval must be obtained from an appropriate research ethics committee, institutional review board, or equivalent competent authority before the research is conducted.

Where applicable, manuscripts should identify:

Name of the ethics committee or institutional review board;
Approval or reference number;
Date of approval or other relevant identifying information;
Ethical approval or exemption status; and
Relevant ethical considerations or limitations.

Where formal ethical approval was not required, authors should provide an appropriate explanation where relevant. The journal may request supporting ethical-approval documentation when necessary.

Human Participant Protection

Authors must protect the rights, safety, dignity, privacy, and confidentiality of research participants.

Manuscripts should provide sufficient information concerning participant selection, eligibility criteria, study procedures, interventions, data collection, and relevant ethical safeguards.

Informed Consent

Appropriate informed consent must be obtained where required by applicable ethical standards, institutional requirements, or regulations.

For case reports, case series, clinical images, photographs, videos, interviews, or other publications containing potentially identifiable patient information, appropriate consent for publication must be obtained where required.

For minors or individuals unable to provide informed consent, consent should be obtained from an authorized parent, guardian, or legally authorized representative, as applicable.

The manuscript should contain an appropriate statement regarding informed consent where applicable. The journal may request confirmation or documentation of consent when necessary.

Patient Privacy and Confidentiality

Patient privacy and confidentiality must be protected throughout the research and publication process.

Authors must not publish unnecessary identifying information, including names, addresses, identification numbers, medical record numbers, or other information that could reasonably identify a patient.

Clinical photographs, imaging, case descriptions, videos, genetic information, or other potentially identifiable material must comply with applicable privacy and consent requirements.

Clinical Trials and Trial Registration

Clinical trials involving human participants should be prospectively registered in an appropriate publicly accessible clinical trial registry before recruitment of the first participant where applicable.

The manuscript should include the name of the clinical trial registry and trial registration number and should provide other relevant registration information where appropriate.

The journal follows the ICMJE clinical trial registration recommendations.

Animal Research

Research involving animals must comply with applicable institutional, national, and international requirements for animal welfare and ethical research.

Where required, approval must be obtained from the appropriate institutional animal ethics committee or equivalent authority before the research is conducted.

Manuscripts should provide appropriate information concerning the approving authority, approval or reference number where applicable, animal-welfare procedures, and measures taken to minimize pain, suffering, distress, or unnecessary use of animals.

Authors should follow the ARRIVE Guidelines where applicable.

Retrospective, Secondary-Use, and Medical Record Studies

Retrospective studies, secondary analyses, studies using medical records, registries, databases, biobanks, or previously collected human data must comply with applicable ethical, privacy, institutional, and legal requirements.

Where ethical approval or exemption is required, this should be documented in the manuscript. Where informed consent was not obtained, authors should provide an appropriate ethical justification or exemption where applicable.

Human Biological Materials, Tissues, and Organs

Research involving human tissues, biological samples, organs, cells, or other human-derived materials must comply with applicable ethical and regulatory requirements.

Where applicable, authors should provide information regarding ethical approval, source of the material, consent requirements, relevant institutional permissions, and safeguards for donor privacy and confidentiality.

Authorship and Contributorship

Authorship must accurately reflect meaningful contributions to the research and manuscript. For biomedical and health-related research, authors should follow the authorship recommendations of the ICMJE.

All listed authors should have made a meaningful contribution to the work, participated sufficiently to take responsibility for appropriate aspects of the work, approved the final version, agreed to its submission and publication, and accepted responsibility for addressing questions concerning the accuracy or integrity of the work.

Guest, gift, and ghost authorship are not permitted. Individuals who contributed to the work but do not qualify for authorship may be acknowledged with their permission.

Changes to Authorship

Requests to add, remove, or rearrange authors should normally be made before acceptance and should include a clear written explanation, submission by the corresponding author, and appropriate confirmation from affected authors and, where applicable, all listed authors.

Requests after acceptance will be considered only in appropriate circumstances, may require additional documentation, and may require publication of a correction.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors, reviewers, editors, and editorial board members must disclose actual, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest that could reasonably affect the research, peer review, interpretation, or editorial decision.

Conflicts may include financial relationships, employment, consultancies, honoraria, grants or other financial support, stock ownership, patents, institutional relationships, personal relationships, professional collaborations, academic or supervisory relationships, competitive relationships, or other relevant interests.

Where no relevant conflict exists, authors may state: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Funding and Sponsor Role

All sources of financial support for the research or preparation of the manuscript must be disclosed.

Where applicable, authors should describe the role of the funding organization or sponsor in study design, data collection, data analysis, manuscript preparation, interpretation, and the decision to submit or publish the work.

Where no external funding was received, authors may provide an appropriate statement such as: No external funding was received for this study.

Data Availability and Research Transparency

Authors should provide a Data Availability Statement where applicable.

The statement should indicate whether supporting data are publicly available, available through a recognized repository, available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, or unavailable because of ethical, privacy, legal, confidentiality, or other legitimate restrictions.

Authors must not disclose confidential or personally identifiable patient information without appropriate authorization.

Sex and Gender Considerations

Where relevant to the research, authors are encouraged to transparently consider and report sex and gender-related factors and to distinguish between sex and gender in study design, analysis, interpretation, and reporting.

Authors may consult the EQUATOR Network for applicable sex- and gender-reporting guidance, including SAGER where appropriate.

Reporting Guidelines

Authors should follow recognized reporting standards appropriate to the study design and article type.

CONSORT – randomized controlled trials
STROBE – observational studies
PRISMA – systematic reviews and meta-analyses
CARE – case reports
STARD – diagnostic accuracy studies
ARRIVE – animal research
COREQ / SRQR – qualitative research
SQUIRE – quality improvement studies
CHEERS – health economic evaluations
EQUATOR Network – additional health-research reporting guidelines

Where applicable, completed reporting checklists may be requested or submitted as supplementary material.

Plagiarism and Text Reuse

The journal does not tolerate plagiarism, inappropriate text reuse, fabrication, falsification, duplicate publication, or other forms of research or publication misconduct.

Submitted manuscripts may be screened using similarity-detection or other appropriate verification tools. A similarity report is an editorial screening tool and does not by itself establish plagiarism.

The journal does not apply an automatic fixed similarity-percentage threshold for determining plagiarism. Editors consider the nature, location, extent, and context of identified similarities, including legitimate quotations, references, standard terminology, and methodological descriptions.

Duplicate and Redundant Publication

Manuscripts must not be submitted simultaneously to more than one journal.

Authors should disclose relevant prior dissemination, including preprints, conference presentations, conference proceedings, theses, dissertations, datasets, previously published related articles, and other relevant forms of prior dissemination.

Substantial overlap with previously published or submitted material must be disclosed to the editorial office.

Image and Clinical Image Integrity

Clinical photographs, radiographs, microscopy images, pathology images, figures, charts, and other visual materials must accurately represent the underlying clinical or research information.

Authors must not manipulate images in a manner that misrepresents the original information. Any permitted image processing should be applied consistently and disclosed where appropriate.

Identifiable patient images must comply with applicable consent and privacy requirements.

Peer-Review Ethics

JAHSM follows a single-blind peer-review process. Primary research articles are subject to external peer review as appropriate to the article type.

Reviewers must maintain confidentiality and provide independent, objective, constructive, and evidence-based assessments.

Reviewers should disclose relevant conflicts of interest, protect confidential manuscript information, avoid personal criticism of authors, not use unpublished information for personal or professional advantage, and identify ethical or research-integrity concerns confidentially to the editor.

Reviewer recommendations are advisory and do not constitute the final publication decision. The final editorial decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief or by a Senior Editor, Associate Editor, or another formally designated editor acting under authority delegated by the Editor-in-Chief.

Editorial Ethics and Independence

The Editor-in-Chief has overall responsibility for the journal's editorial and publication-ethics standards.

The Editor-in-Chief may delegate manuscript handling, peer-review management, and editorial decision-making to a qualified Senior Editor, Associate Editor, or another formally designated editor with appropriate subject expertise.

Editors must maintain confidentiality, manage conflicts of interest, apply editorial policies consistently, maintain editorial independence, ensure appropriate peer review, and base editorial decisions on scholarly, scientific, ethical, and editorial considerations.

Editorial decisions must not be improperly influenced by commercial interests, advertisers, sponsors, authors, reviewers, publishers, or other external parties.

Confidentiality

Manuscripts, unpublished research data, peer-review reports, editorial correspondence, patient information, and other information obtained during the editorial process must be treated as confidential.

Authors, reviewers, editors, and publisher representatives must not disclose confidential information to unauthorized persons.

Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI

The journal supports responsible and transparent use of artificial intelligence and generative AI in scholarly publishing.

AI tools cannot be listed as authors. Authors remain responsible for the accuracy, originality, integrity, citations, interpretation, and ethical compliance of their work.

AI tools must not be used to fabricate or falsify data, results, references, citations, images, patient information, or other scholarly content.

Where substantial AI assistance has been used in manuscript preparation, authors should disclose the tool used and the general nature or purpose of the assistance in accordance with the ICMJE Recommendations on AI in Publishing.

Editors and reviewers must protect confidential manuscript information and should not upload confidential manuscripts, unpublished data, patient information, reviewer reports, or other protected editorial materials to external AI systems where confidentiality or intellectual property could be compromised.

Research and Publication Misconduct

Potential misconduct includes, but is not limited to:

Fabrication of data;
Falsification of data or results;
Plagiarism or inappropriate text reuse;
Duplicate or redundant publication;
Inappropriate image manipulation;
Unethical research practices;
Falsified or inappropriate ethics approvals;
Improper authorship practices;
Undisclosed conflicts of interest;
Manipulation or fabrication of peer review; and
Other conduct that compromises the integrity of the scholarly record.

Credible concerns may be investigated by the editorial team. The journal may request information from authors, reviewers, institutions, ethics committees, or other appropriate parties and may cooperate with relevant institutions when necessary.

Corrections

The journal may publish a correction when an error affects the accuracy or clarity of a published article but does not invalidate the overall scholarly record.

Retractions

An article may be retracted when reliable evidence indicates that the published work is substantially unreliable, involves serious research or publication misconduct, contains serious ethical violations, or otherwise materially compromises the integrity of the scholarly record.

Expressions of Concern

An Expression of Concern may be published when a significant concern regarding a published article requires investigation but the available evidence is not sufficient for an immediate correction or retraction.

Post-Publication Concerns

The journal accepts credible concerns regarding published articles. The editorial team may investigate such concerns and take appropriate action, including correction, retraction, or an Expression of Concern where justified.

Complaints and Appeals

The journal provides a process for handling legitimate complaints and appeals concerning editorial decisions, peer review, publication processes, or journal management.

Appeals should provide clear reasons and relevant supporting information. Appeals are reviewed according to the journal's editorial procedures and publication-ethics principles.

Copyright and Third-Party Material

Authors are responsible for ensuring that appropriate permissions are obtained for copyrighted third-party material included in their manuscripts. Copyright, licensing, and reuse rights are governed by the journal's stated copyright and open-access policies.