For policies on research and publication ethics not stated in these instructions, “Guidelines on Good Publication Practice by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE; http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines) or the “Good Publication Practice Guidelines for Medical Journals” by Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE, https://www.kamje.or.kr/en/main_en) and “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE; https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/, 2023)”’ can be applied.

1. Authorship

Author qualifications should be meet the following four conditions. 1) a significant contribution in the concept, design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of the manuscript; 2) drafting the article or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; 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. After the original manuscript is submitted for the first time, the author's change (adding the author, deleting the author, or reordering the author) must be explained to the editor as a letter from the corresponding author, and all authors' signatures must be attached.

• • Corresponding author and first author: In principle, there should be only one correspondent author per manuscript. KMJ approves when it is clear that the first author made an equal contribution to the corresponding author in conducting the joint research.
• • Correction of author after publication: KMJ will not revise the author after publication unless it is an obvious editorial mistake.

2. Redundant Publication and Plagiarism

Redundant publication is defined as reporting (publishing or attempting to publish) substantially the same work more than once, without attribution of the original source. Submitted manuscripts must not been published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere and no part of the accepted manuscript should be duplicated in any other journal without the permission of the Editorial Board. If duplicate publication related to the papers of this journal is detected, the manuscripts may be rejected, the authors will be announced in the journal and their institutes will be informed. There will also be penalties for the authors. The plagiarism will be crosscheck through iThenticate program (https://www.ithenticate.com/) before review.

3. Secondary Publication

Secondary publication may be allowed only with the consent of KMJ editing committee and the journal editing committee that published the original article and in this case, the general requirements of ‘Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (https://www.icmje.org)’ apply.

4. Conflicts of Interest Statement

The corresponding author must inform the editor of any that could influence the author’s interpretation of the data. Examples of potential conflicts of interest are financial support from or connections to specific companies, political pressure from interest groups, and academically related issues. In particular, all sources of funding applicable to the study should be explicitly stated.

5. Rules and Regulations for Human and Animal Research

If the research involves human subjects, it must comply with the ethical standards of the Helsinki Declaration in 2013 (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/) and be approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). When referring to patients, their identities should not be disclosed or abbreviated. In the case of submitting photographs of patients, their identities should be obscured. If there is even a possibility that the patient’s identity could be revealed, written informed consent must be obtained.
For studies involving animal subjects, regulations relating to the breeding and use of laboratory animals should be observed or the ‘NIH Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals’. If necessary, approval from the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) should be obtained.

6. Registration of Clinical Trial Research

Any research that deals with a clinical trial should be registered in the primary national clinical trial registry site, such as the Korea Clinical Research Information Service (CRIS; https://cris.nih.go.kr), any other primary national registry site accredited by the World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/clinical-trials-registry-platform), or ClinicalTrials.gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov/), a service of the US National Institutes of Health.

7. Process to Manage Research and Publication Misconduct

In suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflict of interest, ethical issues with a submitted manuscript, appropriation of an author’s idea or data, and complaints against editors, the resolving process will be as per the flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts). The Editorial Board’s decision on the suspected cases will be final.

8. Editorial Responsibilities

Editorial board continuously strives to comply with the publishing ethics: guidelines for retracting articles; maintenance of the integrity of the academic record; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standard; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed; no plagiarism, no fraudulent data. Editors are always keeping following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to rejected/accept article; no conflict of interest respect to articles they reject/accept; acceptance of a paper when reasonably certain; promoting publication of correction or retraction when errors are found; preservation of anonymity of reviewers.