GENERAL GUIDELINES

Manuscripts should follow the ethical guidelines specified in the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication (www.icmje.org). For matters not covered in the ICMJE guidelines, authors should refer to the Good Publication Practice Guidelines for Medical Journals (published by the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors, KAMJE; see http://kamje.or.kr) or the Guidelines on Good Publication Practice (published by the Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE; see http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines).

DISCLOSURE OF CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

A conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author's institution), a reviewer, or an editor has financial (e.g., employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, and paid expert testimony) or personal relationships that can inappropriately influence their actions with respect to the manuscript (http://www.icmje.org/disclosure-of-interest/). Authors must fully disclose any such relationships on the separate title page file.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Studies involving human or animal subjects must comply with the 1975 Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects), and authors must include a statement about this in the manuscript. For studies involving human participants, statements concerning the Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval and informed consent must appear at the beginning of the Methods section. Articles that do not meet these requirements will be rejected. Under no circumstances should a manuscript include identifying information such as patients' names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, and other protected healthcare information. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guides for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, February 2006. Occasionally, the Editor-in-Chief may request a copy of the approved IRB or Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) forms from the author(s). If the study reports research involving vulnerable groups, an additional check may be performed. The submitted manuscript will be scrutinized by the editorial office and upon request, documentary evidence (blank consent forms and any related discussion documents from the ethics board) must be supplied. Additionally, when studies describe groups by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, disease, etc., explanation regarding why such categorization was needed must be clearly stated in the article.

REGISTRATION OF CLINICAL TRIALS

Authors are strongly recommended to register their clinical trials with primary national clinical trial registries such as Korea Clinical Research Information Service (CRiS, http://cris.nih.go.kr), other primary national registries accredited by the World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/clinical-trials-registry-platform/network/primary-registries), or clinicaltrial.gov (https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/). We define a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects into intervention and comparison groups, to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome.

AUTHORSHIP

To be listed as an author, an individual must meet all of the following criteria: 1) made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the study; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; 2) contributed to drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 3) provided approval of the final version to be published; and 4) agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that any questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. All individuals who do not meet the above criteria but have contributed to the article should be listed in the Acknowledgments section (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).

ORIGINALITY AND DUPLICATE PUBLICATION

Submitted manuscripts must be original and not be under consideration by other scientific journals for publication at the same time. Accepted manuscripts should not be duplicated in whole or in part in any other scientific journal without permission from the Editorial Board. If duplicate publications of the papers published in this journal or plagiarism is detected, the journal may take action against the authors, which may range from requesting their institutions to assess the facts or asking the Editor-in-Chief of the counterpart journal to acknowledge the error and retract the paper, to banning the authors from publishing in PAN for up to 3 years. The final sanction against the author(s) may be discussed in the Editorial Board meeting.

EMBARGO POLICY

All contents of an accepted article must be strictly confidential and may not appear in media, either in print or electronic form, before the article's embargo date. All authors and funding institutions must adhere to this policy and not distribute the results of their work prior to the embargo date. If an embargo break is a result of any action by an author, they risk the withdrawal of the accepted article. Violations of the embargo policy may also jeopardize future acceptance of the author’s manuscripts by PAN. Generally, embargoes on journal articles are lifted at the time of publication, either online or in print (whichever comes first).

SECONDARY PUBLICATION

Manuscripts may be republished if they satisfy the conditions laid down by the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).

PROCESS FOR MANAGING RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION MISCONDUCT

Suspected cases of research and publication misconduct—such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fabricated data, authorship issues, undisclosed conflicts of interest, ethical issues in the submitted manuscript, reviewer misconduct, or complaints against editors—will be resolved by the Editorial Board as per the flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts).

All papers accepted to this journal are checked for plagiarism using the iThenticate (https://www.ithenticate.com/) program. If the plagiarism rate is found to be within the permissible limits, we begin the process of editing and publishing.

Editorial responsibilities

The editorial board will continuously work to monitor and safeguard publication ethics: providing guidelines for retracting articles; maintaining the integrity of the academic record; preventing business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies where needed; and ensuring that no plagiarized work or fraudulent data are published. All manuscripts will be subject to a similarity check (Powered by iThenticate) to assess the originality of the submitted work. If the similarity index is unexpectedly high, the manuscript will be screened more precisely for plagiarism or duplicate publication. Editors maintain the following: the responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article; have no conflicts of interest with respect to the articles they reject/accept; accept a paper when reasonably certain of its appropriateness; promote the publication of a correction or retraction when errors are found; and preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
All manuscripts from editors, employees, or members of the editorial board are processed in the same way as other unsolicited manuscripts. During the review process, submitters will not engage in the decision process. Editors will not handle their own manuscripts although they are commissioned ones.