Authorship Criteria

Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to:  

1.                Concept and design of study or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data;

2.                Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and

3.       Each contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content of the manuscript. The order of naming the contributors should be based on the relative contribution of the contributor towards the study and writing the manuscript. Once submitted the order cannot be changed without written consent of all the contributors.

 Conflicts of Interest/ Competing Interests

Authors should disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with publication of the manuscript/ s or an institution/s or product/s that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or is important to the outcome of the study to be published. Authors should also disclose conflict of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

 Protection of Patients Rights to Privacy

Care should be taken not to disclose identifying information in the text, photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian, wherever applicable) gives written informed consent for publication. Authors should remove patients' names from figures unless they have obtained written informed consent from the patients. When informed consent has been obtained, it should be indicated in the manuscript.

 Ethics
Experiments on human subjects should be in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (http://www.wma.net/e/policy/17-c_e.html). Patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers should not be mentioned. When reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether the institution's or a national research council's guide for, or any national law on the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.