EUROPEAN ANNALS OF DENTAL SCIENCES ETHICAL POLICIES
Data sharing and bioethics
Human and animal experiments
For original research manuscripts reporting experiments on animals, the corresponding author must confirm that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. The manuscript must include a statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments, including any relevant details regarding animal welfare, patient anonymity, drug side effects, and informed consent.
For experiments involving human subjects, authors must identify the committee (e.g., Institutional Review Board [IRB]) approving the experiments and include with their submission a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects. All human studies must adhere to the principles set out in the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki, published online October 19, 2013. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.281053).
It is the author’s responsibility to ensure that a patient’s anonymity be carefully protected and to verify that any experimental investigation with human subjects reported in the manuscript was performed with informed consent and following all the guidelines for experimental investigation with human subjects required by the institution(s) with which all the authors are affiliated. All identifying details (patient names and/or initials and name of specific hospital unit) should be removed from the text, tables, and/or radiographs or other figures. Patients should be assigned numbers instead. Identifying data should be removed from a manuscript unless important clinically or epidemiologically. Clinically and epidemiologically significant details include: race, sex, age, occupation, country or region of origin, and/or sexual orientation. Note that the same information must be given for each patient or group. If any individual data is included, written consent for participation/publication must be given for each patient or group.
If any individual data is included (i.e., an identifiable full-face picture in a clinical report), written consent for participation/publication must be obtained from every individual whose data is included. A written statement attesting that the author has received and archived such written patient consent must accompany the manuscript. For research articles, if authors cannot obtain consent to publish individual data, they may only provide summary results. Exclusions to this include:
• The patients are de-identified
• The patients are dead
• There has been a waiver granted by the Institutional Review Board (IRB).
Permissions Form: If identifying details must be retained, the author must attest they have informed consent from the patients (a signed permissions form), see Appendix A below.
Permissions must appear in English. In the case of a non-English speaking patient/author the
permission should appear first in the native language with the translation to English below and the signature following both. If the patient cannot be located or refuses to consent to publication, the manuscript will NOT be published. In the event that the patient cannot provide consent due to death or legal incompetency (this includes photos of corpses) permission from the power of attorney is needed as well as proof of power of attorney. If the patient is a minor, a legal guardian must provide permission. Previous publication of news coverage does NOT eliminate a patient’s right to privacy and does NOT negate the need for patient permission. This informed consent should be indicated in the text of the article (in the Methods section, if appropriate) or in the Acknowledgments at the end of the article. Permissions forms should be uploaded at the time of submission. Articles will not be reviewed until permissions forms are submitted.
Conflicts of interest
Authors are required to disclose any possible conflicts of interest. These include, for example, patent, ownership, employment, stock ownership, consultancies, speaker's fee. Author's conflict of interest (or information specifying the absence of conflicts of interest) will be included on the title page of published articles.
Authorship
Requirements for all categories of articles largely conform to the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals,” developed by the ICMJE. A manuscript will be considered for publication with the understanding that:
• all named authors have agreed to its submission
• it is not currently being considered for publication by another journal
• if the paper is accepted, it/ a part of it will not subsequently be published in the same or similar form in any language without the consent of publisher.
Each author must have contributed sufficiently to the intellectual content of the submission. Any changes to the author list after submission, such as a change in the order of the authors, or the deletion or addition of authors, will follow the guidelines as set out by COPE (http://publicationethics.org/). The corresponding author must confirm that she or he has had full access to the data in the study and final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:
1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design or the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. Agreement 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.
In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work she or he has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co- authors.
When a large multi-author group has conducted the work, the group ideally should decide who will be an author before the work is started and confirm who is an author before submitting the manuscript for publication. All members of the group named as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, including approval of the final manuscript, and they should be able to take public responsibility for the work and should have full confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the work of other group authors.
Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.
Contributions by individuals who made direct contributions to the work but do not meet all of the above criteria should be noted in the Acknowledgments section of the manuscript. Examples include: a statistician who has consulted on the included statistical tests; a colleague who has edited the document for English clarity, but did not contribute to the content; a photographer or artist who prepared the figures; a dental technician or assistant who was invaluable to the care of the patient being reported on.
Medical writers and industry employees can be contributors. Their roles, affiliations, and potential conflicts of interest should be included in the author list or noted in the Acknowledgments with their contribution to the work submitted. Failure to acknowledge these contributors can be considered inappropriate.
Contributions of authors must be stated at the end of the manuscript.
Plagiarism
Submitted manuscripts are evaluated via the iThenticate Professional Plagiarism Prevention program (www.ithenticate.com).
European Annals of Dental Sciences defines major plagiarism as any case involving:
• unattributed copying of another person's data/findings, or resubmission of an entire publication under another author's name (either in the original language or in translation), or
• verbatim copying of >100 words of original material in the absence of any citation to the source material, or
• unattributed use of original, published, academic work, such as the structure, argument or hypothesis/idea of another person or group where this is a major part of the new publication and there is evidence that it was not developed independently.
Minor plagiarism is defined as:
• verbatim copying of <100 words without indicating that these are a direct quotation from an original work (whether or not the source is cited), unless the text is accepted as widely used or standardized (e.g., the description of a standard technique)
• close copying (not quite verbatim but changed only slightly from the original) of significant sections (e.g., >100 words) from another work (whether or not that work is cited).
If the editorial board of the European Annals of Dental Sciences suspects a case of plagiarism, we will first contact the authors for clarification. If the authors are unable to sufficiently explain the potential plagiarism, we reserve the right to inform the authors' institutions and funding agencies. If a published article is suspected of plagiarism, we will take the further step of informing our readers, potentially via retraction of the article.
Retraction policy
In the unfortunate event an article published in the European Annals of Dental Sciences needs to be retracted, we will follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) here: http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/guidelines-retracting-articles. Potential reasons for retraction include plagiarism, redundant publication, or unreliable results (either through error or misconduct).
Corrections policy
If authors or readers note an error in a published article, they may contact the editorial office. If the correction is minor (i.e., the institution of an author should be changed, or there was a typographical error), the European Annals of Dental Sciences will publish an error notice at the Editor-in- Chief’s discretion. If the error is major (i.e., tests were incorrectly conducted, previously published work was mis-interpreted), please submit a letter to the editor outlining the potential errors. Such errors could potentially lead to the article being retracted.
April 30, 2022
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