Publication Ethics & Malpractice Statement

The Yenagoa Medical Journal follows ICMJE’s Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, and COPE’s Core Practice guidance.

Below are key points, however, authors should always refer to the guidelines mentioned above.

Criteria for Authorship
All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship listed below:
1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged.
Please refer to the ICMJE Recommendations
(Defining the role of authors and contributors) for more details.
Click here to download the ICMJE Recommendations. In a situation where there is any change in authorship of a submitted manuscript, a letter requesting a change in authorship and signed by all authors should be attached to an email addressed to the editor-in-chief. Send email to yenagoamedicaljournal@gmail.com. Any change in authorship after article publication is not allowed in the Yenagoa Medical Journal.

The Yenagoa Medical Journal will not take any responsibility for any dispute related to authorship of a published article.

Conflicts of Interest/Competing Interest
A conflict of interest is a circumstance that creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest. This might influence or bias a research work.

a. Authors: When authors submit any type or format of manuscript to the Yenagoa Medical Journal, they are expected to disclose all relationships and activities that might influence or be seen to bias their work.
b. Peer Reviewers: At the time of being asked to review, reviewers are asked to disclose to the editors any relationships or activities that could bias their reviews and to recuse themselves from reviewing any such manuscript for which a potential for bias exists.
c. Editorial board: Editors with relationships or activities that pose a potential conflict of interest concerning a manuscript are expected to recuse themselves from editorial decisions about such manuscript.

Data Sharing and Reproducibility
Authors should view and adhere strictly to the guidelines on preparation and submission of each manuscript type as in Authors Guidelines section of the Yenagoa Medical Journal website. Reporting should meet STROBE, SPIRIT, CONSORT, PRISMA guidelines as the case may be. It is good and encouraged practice to register clinical trials and other appropriate study designs in a trial registry.
Authors should be prepared to make the raw data used for the analysis of their work available (if required) together with the manuscript for editorial review. If possible, authors should ensure accessibility of such data to other professionals by depositing in a public data repository.

Ethical Oversight
Authors should ensure that informed consent or assent was obtained for research conducted with human participants and should obtain a protocol approval from appropriate Institutional Research Ethics Committee(s). If the work involves the use of animals, the authors should ensure that all procedures were performed in compliance with relevant laws and institutional guidelines and that the approval of appropriate institutional committee(s) was obtained. The manuscript should contain statements to these effect.
If the work involves any chemical, procedure or equipment that has any unusual hazards inherent in its use, authors must clearly identify this in the manuscript.
Personal information and data of participants must be treated with high levels of confidentiality and privacy.

Intellectual Property
Authors should ensure that they have written and submitted only original works.
Plagiarism is the use of another author’s words or ideas without attribution or an attempt by an author to pass off someone else’s work as his/her own, either deliberately or otherwise. This usually occurs when large chunks of a source material are copied and pasted into a manuscript instead of elaborating such ideas with personal words and thoughts with appropriate citation.
Plagiarism is an unethical publishing act and is unacceptable.
The Yenagoa Medical Journal will deal with text recycling (self-plagiarism) using the COPE text recycling guidelines for editors.
Papers describing essentially the same research should not be published in more than one journal as a primary publication. Hence, manuscripts submitted to the Yenagoa Medical Journal should not have been published before or be under consideration for publication by another journal.
Redundant publication (splitting of one study into several parts and publication in two or more journals, or reuse of previously published results without proper cross-referencing or justification) is unethical and unacceptable.
Data falsification and data fabrication are unethical and not unacceptable.

Copyright of the submitted manuscript and final published articles (version of record) in the Yenagoa Medical Journal is retained by the authors of the article.
Articles in the Yenagoa Medical Journal are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). For more details, go to Creative Commons.
Under this license, the Yenagoa Medical Journal and third parties shall have rights to the authors’ work.

Allegations of misconduct/Complaints and appeals
As part of effort to ensure the credibility of published articles, the Yenagoa Medical Journal is open to investigate and react appropriately to issues of breach of publication ethics and research misconduct.

Allegation of misconduct or expression of concern about the conduct or integrity of the work described in a submitted manuscript or published article should be sent by email to the editor-in-chief. Send email to yenagoamedicaljournal@gmail.com.
Appropriate procedures will be initiated by the editorial board of the Yenagoa Medical Journal (which may necessitate publishing expression of concern and/or a retraction of an article) in line with the COPE guidelines.

Policy on post-publication comments and requests for corrections
Comments, questions and criticisms on any article published in the Yenagoa Medical Journal over matters of debate will be handled as letters to the editor or as print or electronic correspondence. Authors who are publishing in the Yenagoa Medical Journal are expected to carefully go through the gallery proof of the articles when received and indicate all corrections at that stage. Changes will not be effected to address an error in a final published article (version of record), except where errors may have a significant effect on the indexation or understanding and scientific interpretation of the article. Where necessary, changes will include republication without correction notices (silent corrections), correction by publication of correction notices and correction by retraction with republication. See details