Ethical Principles

IKUSBD adopts the COPE, ICMJE, and EQUATOR Network principles in its publication processes.
Research on humans or animals must be conducted in accordance with national legislation, institutional arrangements, and international ethical standards.
The Helsinki Declaration should be followed for studies involving human participants, and the ARRIVE guidelines for animal experiments.
Clinical research must be registered in an international database (e.g., ClinicalTrials.gov or WHO ICTRP), and the registration number must be included in the abstract.
Ethics committee approval must be obtained. To protect the double-blind peer review process, the name, decision date, and number of the ethics committee are anonymized within the article; this information is only presented on the cover page or in a confidential document. Informed consent must be obtained from participants, and the confidentiality of personal data must be meticulously protected.

Authorship Principles and Contribution Roles

Authorship rights belong to individuals who have made a meaningful and direct scientific contribution to the study. Authors must have played an active role in at least one of the following stages: planning, data collection, analysis, interpretation, and reporting of the study. All authors must approve the final version of the article and share joint responsibility for the integrity of the work. Author contributions are specified according to the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) system. These roles are defined as: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data Curation, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Review & Editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project Administration, and Funding Acquisition. These contributions are clearly stated in the Declarations section at the end of the article. The order of authors is determined by the joint consent of all authors prior to submission. After the article is accepted, additions, deletions, or changes in author order can only be made with the approval of the Editor-in-Chief and the written consent of all authors. The author is obliged to properly store the data used and to share it upon request.

Conflicts of Interest and Funding Transparency

Authors are obliged to clearly state all financial or non-financial interests that may arise in the conduct or publication of the research. If the study was supported by any institution or fund, this support information and project number should be stated.
Editors and reviewers are also obliged to maintain their impartiality in the evaluation process by declaring any potential conflicts of interest.

Data, Material and Code Sharing

IKUSBD supports the verifiability and reusability of research data.
Authors should clearly state the access status of the data; if possible, they should upload the data to publicly accessible repositories (e.g., Figshare, Dryad, Zenodo) and share the DOI number.
The use of Research Resource Identifier (RRID) for biological materials and software is encouraged.
Authors are obliged to share their data upon request.

Promoting Open Science and Data Sharing:

IKUSBD actively promotes Open Science principles to support the reproducibility and transparency of research.
Authors are strongly advised to upload raw data supporting the research findings to a publicly accessible repository after the article is accepted and to share a persistent identifier (DOI) for this data. In cases where data sharing is not possible (e.g., patient confidentiality or commercial reasons), the reason must be clearly stated in the “Statements” section.

Similarity and Originality Policy

All submissions are checked with the iThenticate similarity scanning program.
The upper limit for the similarity rate is set at 20%, excluding the bibliography and appropriate citations.
If ethical violations such as plagiarism, data fabrication, falsification, duplication, or salami publishing are detected, the process will be stopped and action will be taken according to COPE guidelines.

Originality and Multiple Submission Statement:

All authors are required to complete the “Originality and Conflict of Interest Statement Form” available on the journal's online system during submission.

With this statement, authors commit to:

That the article has not been previously published anywhere or is not under review,

That it has not been simultaneously submitted to another journal,

That all authors approve of their contributions and share responsibility,

That they declare all known conflicts of interest.

Peer Review Process

IKUSBD uses a double-blind peer review system.
The preliminary evaluation of the article is done by the editor in terms of scope and format.
The scientific evaluation process is carried out by at least two independent reviewers.
Reviewers are obliged to complete the review in a timely manner.
Reviewer reports should be constructive, objective, and respectful; suggestions, criticisms, and reasons for revisions should be clearly stated.
Authors have the right to respond to reviewers' opinions in an academic style. The editor may appoint a third reviewer or request the opinion of the advisory board if deemed necessary.

Reviewer Pool and Evaluation Standards:

Our journal is continuously