Ethics, Consent and Research Conduct

TPHJ requires that all research involving human participants, human data or human biological material is conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and relevant national or institutional regulations. Authors must state in the Methods section that the study protocol was reviewed and approved by an appropriate Institutional Review Board or Research Ethics Committee, and, where available, provide the approval number or code. For public health surveillance activities, programme evaluations or analyses of routinely collected data where formal ethics review was not required, authors should clearly justify this and describe how confidentiality and data protection were maintained.

For research involving human participants, authors must confirm that informed consent was obtained, and whether it was written or verbal. For case reports, case series and any material that may allow identification of an individual, authors are required to obtain written consent for publication from the patient or legal guardian and to state this in the manuscript. Identifying details should be removed or anonymised as far as possible.

For animal research, authors must confirm compliance with institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of animals, and provide details of ethics approval.

TPHJ has a strict policy against plagiarism, duplicate publication, data fabrication or falsification and inappropriate manipulation of images. All submissions may be checked using plagiarism detection software. Suspected research or publication misconduct will be handled using recommendations from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). This may result in rejection, retraction or notification of institutional authorities, depending on the severity of the issue.