Ethics Policy

Note: The PNWMSRJ has based their guidelines off the American Medical Student Research Journal (amsrj.org). Please visit this link for additional information, but realize that word counts may differ for the PNWMSRJ. For questions regarding author guidelines please contact admin@pnwmsrj.org.

Publication Ethics

  1. All authors submitting work to the PNWMSRJ will be held to high standards of publication ethics as represented in the following sections of authorship, originality, conflicts of interest, and confidentiality.
  2. Any cases of suspected misconduct or misappropriation will be investigated by the PNWMSRJ Editorial Board. Breaches of these publication ethics are grounds for immediate dismissal of any submitted work and revocation of any work previously submitted to the PNWMSRJ. Investigation may include, but is not limited to, use of plagiarism search engines, placement of search alerts in medical journal indexing sites for withdrawn accepted manuscripts to monitor for possible duplicate submission, and contacting institutional administrative staff for verification of medical student status.
  3. Breaches of scientific and/or ethical misconduct may be reported to the author’s/authors’ institution(s) and/or to other relevant parties at the discretion of the Editorial Board. Ethical misconduct includes, but is not limited to, inclusion of fraudulent or knowingly misrepresented data, submission of unoriginal or incorrectly attributed work, submission of a previously published article to PNWMSRJ, submission of an article under consideration for publication elsewhere to PNWMSRJ, and submission of an article under consideration or accepted by PNWMSRJ to another journal.

 

AUTHORSHIP

  1. Authors included in each submission must have contributed in some significant way to the conception, implementation, documentation, or interpretation of the data of the submitted work. All authors included in the manuscript must be in agreement of the content and interpretation of the submitted work.
  2. Changes to the manuscript involving authorship must be approved by all authors of the paper and accompanied by written documentation.
  3. Persons who have contributed to the paper but were not involved in its major production may be referenced in an acknowledgement section. Acknowledgements should be limited to professional colleagues or advisors.

 

ORIGINALITY

All work submitted to the PNWMSRJ must be the original work of the represented authors and must not have been published previously, awaiting publication elsewhere, or under consideration for publication elsewhere. All submissions to PNWMSRJ must be accurately represented by the authors including but not limited to:

  1. reproducible research data according to the materials and methods included in the submission;
  2. case studies obtainable from archives or medical records of a medical institution;
  3. original essays not previously published
  4. artwork or images that were created, conceived, or produced by the stated authorship.

Proper citation must be included for all submissions in accordance with the submission guidelines. Plagiarism will not be tolerated by the PNWMSRJ.

Data found to be fraudulent or knowingly misrepresented will be excluded from publication, and the submission authorship will be subsequently removed from consideration for publication in the PNWMSRJ. Additionally, case reports, opinion articles, and other submissions to the PNWMSRJ that fail to meet the standards of originality stated herein will be subsequently removed from consideration for publication, and the authorship will subsequently be removed from all future submission consideration.

 

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

  1. Disclosure of any direct or indirect financial connections or interest must be revealed with any PNWMSRJ submission. If there are any conflicts of interest, financial or non-financial, by any of the submission authors, the conflict details must be mentioned in the title page on behalf of all the authors and co-authors involved.
  2. Conflicts of interest will be made available in the published submissions.

 

PROTECTION OF RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS

  1. Reports on animal experimentation must be accompanied by documentation of adherence to institutional and national standards of care for the use of laboratory animals, in accordance with the International Association of Veterinary Editors’ Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare.All experimentation involving human subjects must be done under institutional IRB approval in accordance with the World Medical Association’s Helsinki Declaration of Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects.
  2. Any use of patient information should be accompanied by a statement on the title page documenting approval or waiver by the home institution’s IRB.

 

CONFIDENTIALITY

  1. All patient information must be presented in accordance with the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and federal law. By submitting any work to the PNWMSRJ, all authors maintain that the work presented therein is in compliance with HIPAA and federal standards.
  2. Authors should strive to use only the minimum necessary patient information required to accomplish the intended research purpose.