Studies Involving Human Subjects

All manuscripts reporting research involving human subjects, human material, or human data must be performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki after obtaining approval from an appropriate ethics committee. This should be clearly stated in your manuscript, including the name of the ethics committee, the reference number where appropriate, and a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects.

Studies Involving Animal Subjects

MJMS recommends following the ARRIVE reporting guidelines when documenting animal studies. All experiments must be performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. This should be clearly stated in your manuscript, including the name of the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments, the reference number where appropriate, as well as any relevant details regarding animal welfare, patient anonymity, drug side effects, housing and husbandry.

Informed Consent

Publication of identifiable images from human research participants must be accompanied by a statement attesting that informed consent for it has been obtained. In the case of a deceased subject, consent should be sought from the next of kin. Protection of patient anonymity should be prioritized. Images without appropriate consent will be removed from publication.

Clinical Trials

All clinical trials must be registered in a public registry prior to submission. The trial registry number must be included in the manuscript. The journal follows the trials registration policy of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE, www.icmje.org). Acceptable registries must meet the following ICMJE requirements:

• be publicly available, searchable, and open to all prospective registrants
• have a validation mechanism for registration data
• be managed by a not-for-profit organization

Examples of registries that meet these criteria include:

1. ClinicalTrials.gov the registry sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine
2. The European Clinical Trials Database
3. The International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number Registry

Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) must adhere to the CONSORT statement (CONsolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) and submissions must be accompanied by a completed CONSORT checklist (uploaded as a related manuscript file). Please see www.consort-statement.org for further information.

Preprint

A preprint is a manuscript that is made available publicly via a community preprint server prior to (or simultaneous with) submission to a journal. Preprints are becoming more common across our discipline and can enhance the discovery of work. However, MJMS will not be able to consider and accept any manuscript that has been posted on preprint servers such as ArXiv, biorVix and Peerj PrePrints and appeared as a preprint.