Research integrity & ethics policy

Originality of Articles
Ethical Clearance
Conflict of Interest
Policy on Human and Animal Rights & Drug Names
Policy on Informed Consent
Scientific misconduct and ethical standards

Originality of Articles

Manuscripts submitted to the DSIIJ must not have been submitted for publication in another journal. The laboratory, department, affiliation or institute of origin of research and the role of each author in the case of multiple authorship, must be indicated. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a written declaration that the materials have not been submitted for publication either in part or in full, in another journal. Such declaration may be included in the Submission letter. The journal will/will not consider papers that have posted work prior to publication on preprint servers.

Ethical Clearance

Clinical studies are expected to conform to the Proposed International Guidelines for Biomedical Research involving Human Subjects issued by CIOMS, (Geneva 1982). Statements about ethical clearance (if appropriate) and obtaining participants’ informed consent should be included in the manuscript. Experimental animals must be properly anaesthetized to avoid suffering and anaesthetic procedure fully explained in the text. Authors are required to provide evidence of ethical approval for their study. All manuscripts should indicate the name of the approving institution and the reference number of the approval letter(s) obtained for the study protocol. This information should be stated in the Methods section of the manuscript.

In the online submission process one of the checklist items is to indicate that ethical approval was obtained for the research. Authors are required to provide evidence of ethical approval for their study. The name of the approving institution and the reference number of the approval letter should be stated in the manuscript, in the Methods section.

Authors who do not comply with the said code of ethics both for humans and animals will have their manuscripts rejected.

Conflict of Interest

Authors and guest editors must disclose specific information relating to any financial relationship they may have with a sponsoring organization and any interest that organization presents, as well as with any for-profit product discussed or implied in the text of the manuscript.

All potential conflicts of interest must be listed in this section. Any personal or financial relationship with an individual or an organization which may influence your interpretation of the results of the study should be disclosed here.
Where authors have no competing interests, please state so in this section.
In the case of authors not providing any text for this section, and after prompting during the review stage has not provided any input from the authors, it will be filled with the following text:
The authors of this study declined to declare any competing interests.
Before declaring there are no competing interests, we ask the authors to consider the following cases.

Have you received any money, directly or indirectly (fees, salaries, funding) from an organization which could financially gain, or lose, from the publication of this study, now or in the future?

Is an organization paying the Article Processing Charge for this article? If so, please state.

Do you hold stocks, shares or options with a company which could gain, or lose, financially from this publication, now or in the future?

Do you hold, or are you applying for, a patent relating to any part of this work?

Have you benefitted financially from any company which holds similar patents?

Are there any non-financial conflicts of interest, such as personal, political, religious, ideological, intellectual or commercial? If so, please list.

If you are unsure of a coauthors conflict of interest, please contact us in confidence

Policy on Human and Animal Rights & Drug Names

The manuscript should include details of the design of the study, setting, participants and materials involved, and the type of analysis used.
Particular attention should be paid to the following scenarios:

Use of animals: State the species, strain, number used, and pertinent descriptive characteristics. When describing surgical procedures, identify the pre-anesthetic and anesthetic agents used and the amounts, concentrations, routes, and frequency of administration of each.
Human studies: Indicate that the study was approved by an appropriate institutional ethics committee and that the subject gave informed consent [NB proof of written consent from the subject may be asked for at time of submission]
Drugs & devices: List the name and manufacturer of all reagents, equipment and devices used in the study. Generic, rather than trademark, names are preferred.

Scientific misconduct and ethical standards

Scientific misconduct is related to the fabrication or falsification of data, and plagiarism. Breaches of publication ethics include duplicate publication, misrepresentation of author contributions, and failure to disclose potential financial conflicts of interest. The journal reserves the right to notify the head of the sponsoring institution or the funding body scientific misconduct or beaches of publication ethics be discovered during the processing of a manuscript for investigation. The Journal itself will not be involved in the actual investigation or make determinations of misconduct. The Editor-in-Chief will notify the authors of the intention to report the suspicion of research misconduct or breach of publication ethics.

The Journal uses urkund.com (Sweden) services for plagiarism checking.