Good Clinical Practice guidelines (e.g., the Good Clinical Practice in Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-Regulated Clinical Trials (USA) or the Medical Research Council Guidelines for Good Clinical Practice in Clinical Trials (UK)) and/or the World Medical Association (WMA) Declaration of Helsinki should be followed in the design, conduct, and reporting of any research involving human or animal subjects.
The inclusion of a declaration stating the experiments were conducted with prior informed consent (written or verbal, as necessary) from each participant is required for any publication detailing a study involving human beings.
The Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008 (5), and any applicable institutional and/or national guidelines for the protection of human research subjects should be cited and referenced when reporting experiments involving human subjects. The authors have the burden of explaining their methodology and providing evidence that the study was approved by the institutional review board if there is any doubt if the research was done in conformity with the Helsinki Declaration.
When describing animal experiments, authors should state whether or not they complied with institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals. Whenever possible, an institutional, national, or international ethics committee should have reviewed and authorized any experiments involving vertebrates or controlled invertebrates. The work must include a statement explaining how it complies with rules and/or receives ethical approval. Author(s) must provide evidence of informed client permission and adherence to a gold standard (best practice) of veterinary treatment for studies involving client-owned animals.
Informed consent must be sought from participants (or their parent or guardian in the case of children under 18) before any research involving human subjects can begin, and a statement to this effect must be included in any published work involving human beings.
Written informed consent for the publication of any details, images, or videos pertaining to individual participants must be obtained from the participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 18), and a statement to this effect must appear in the work. The Editor(s) will have access to a consent form upon request, and all information provided on the form will be kept strictly confidential. Consent for publication of photos may not be necessary if they are completely unidentified and there are no details on persons disclosed within the paper. The Editor(s) have the final say on whether or not permission to publish is needed.
Without the patient's knowledge and permission, any invasion of privacy is unacceptable. Unless the patient's name, initials, or hospital number is absolutely necessary for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication, identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees. To obtain informed consent, a patient who can be identified must be shown the final article. All sources of financial support for the author's writing assistance should be disclosed. Unless absolutely necessary, personal information should be left out of the text. It is challenging to provide complete anonymity, but in cases where this is not possible, informed consent should be acquired. To safeguard patients' privacy, it's not enough, for instance, to black out their eyes in images. It is the author's responsibility to inform the editor(s) if any identifying information has been changed to safeguard anonymity (for example, in a genetic pedigree), and the editor(s) should make a note of this. The journal's guidelines for writers should emphasize the need for informed consent. Informed consent should be noted in the published work when it has been acquired.