Ethical Principles and Publication Policy

1. Standards We Follow

Pediatrics & Nursology conducts its editorial work in accordance with the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME), and the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki.

Where a situation is not addressed below, the relevant COPE flowchart is applied.

2. Editorial Independence and Responsibilities

Editorial decisions rest on the scientific merit, methodological soundness and practice relevance of the manuscript. They are not influenced by the authors' nationality, institutional affiliation, gender, seniority, funding source, or by any commercial, political or personal consideration.

The Editor-in-Chief holds final responsibility for what the journal publishes. Editors:

• assess manuscripts on their content alone;
• do not disclose information about a submission to anyone other than the authors, reviewers and, where necessary, the publisher;
• do not use unpublished material from a submission in their own research;
• recuse themselves from any manuscript in which they have a competing interest;
• act when an ethical concern is raised about a submitted or published article, however long after publication;
• publish corrections, clarifications and retractions when required, and do not allow commercial or institutional pressure to compromise intellectual standards.

Submissions from editors and editorial board members. A manuscript authored by an editor or a board member is assigned to an independent editor with no involvement in the work. The authoring editor is removed from the editorial workflow for that submission, has no access to reviewer identities, correspondence or the decision before it is issued, and takes no part in any related discussion. This applies equally to the Editor-in-Chief.

3. Authorship

Authorship requires all four ICMJE criteria: substantial contribution to conception or design, or to acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data; drafting or critically revising the work; approval of the final version; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

• Acquisition of funding, general supervision of a research group, or provision of materials or participants does not by itself justify authorship. Such contributions belong in the acknowledgements, with the person's permission.
• Individual contributions are declared using the CRediT taxonomy.
• Any change to the author list after submission  addition, removal, or reordering requires written agreement from every author, including the person concerned, together with a reason.
• Guest, gift and ghost authorship are grounds for rejection or, after publication, retraction.
• The corresponding author is responsible for communication with the journal, for confirming that all co-authors have approved the submission, and for responding to queries after publication.
• AI tools do not meet the criteria for authorship and cannot be listed as authors, because they cannot take responsibility for the work. Disclosure requirements for AI-assisted writing are set out in the Author Guidelines.

4. Research Ethics in Studies Involving Children

Because the journal's participants are largely children, the following requirements are applied strictly and are checked at editorial screening.

Ethics approval. Studies involving human participants must have been approved by an appropriately constituted research ethics committee before data collection began. The manuscript must state the name of the committee, the approval number and the date. The original decision letter is uploaded as a separate file. Retrospective approval is not accepted. Studies exempt from approval must explain the basis of the exemption.

Consent and assent. Written informed consent must be obtained from parents or legal guardians, and assent from the child where developmentally appropriate. Manuscripts must state how assent was sought, how children were informed in age-appropriate terms, and how a child's refusal or withdrawal was respected  including where a parent had consented.

Protection of participants. Reports of interventions in children should describe participant burden, procedures for managing distress, and any adverse events, including those judged unrelated to the intervention. Absence of adverse events must be stated explicitly rather than left unmentioned.

Privacy. Identifying details must be omitted unless essential. Publication of any identifiable image, video, or case description requires separate written consent for publication from the parent or guardian and, where appropriate, assent from the child. Eye bars do not constitute anonymisation.

Trial registration. Clinical trials must be registered prospectively in a WHO-recognised registry or ClinicalTrials.gov, before enrolment of the first participant. The registry name and identifier must appear at the end of the abstract. Discrepancies between registered and reported outcomes must be explained.

Vulnerable populations. Studies involving children in institutional care, children with disabilities, children who cannot self-report, or children in humanitarian and low-resource settings require explicit justification of the safeguards applied.

5. Peer Reviewers

Reviewers treat manuscripts as confidential documents, declare competing interests, decline invitations outside their competence, provide objective and specific assessments, and identify relevant published work the authors have overlooked. They may not use unpublished material for their own purposes or share the manuscript including with AI tools  without the editor's permission. Full requirements are set out in the Reviewer Guidelines.

6. Conflicts of Interest

All authors declare financial and non-financial interests relevant to the submitted work, using the ICMJE disclosure form. Financial interests include employment, consultancies, honoraria, grants, patents, stock ownership and paid expert testimony. Non-financial interests include personal, academic, political and institutional relationships that a reasonable reader might consider relevant.

Funders have no role in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or the decision to submit; where any such role existed, it must be described. Reviewers and editors declare and recuse themselves in the same terms.

Declaring an interest does not preclude publication. Failing to declare one may result in rejection or retraction.

7. Data Integrity and Availability

Fabrication, falsification and selective reporting of data are among the most serious breaches of research integrity and result in rejection or retraction.

Every research article must carry a data availability statement describing where the underlying data are held and on what terms, or explaining why they cannot be shared. Authors are encouraged to deposit de-identified data and analysis code in a recognised repository. Editors may request the underlying data, analysis files or original images at any point during review or after publication.

Images must not be manipulated in any way that alters the information they convey. Adjustments to brightness or contrast must be applied to the whole image and disclosed.

8. Plagiarism

All manuscripts are screened for textual similarity before review and again before publication. The journal's thresholds, the types of plagiarism covered, and the action taken at each stage are set out in the Plagiarism Policy.

9. Corrections, Retractions and Expressions of Concern

Published articles are never removed or silently edited. Where the record requires amendment, the journal issues a citable notice linked to the original article:

• Correction — an error that does not affect the findings or conclusions.
• Expression of concern — a substantiated concern that cannot yet be resolved, typically pending institutional investigation.
• Retraction — findings shown to be unreliable through error or misconduct; plagiarism; duplicate publication; unethical research; or authorship in serious dispute. Retracted articles remain accessible, clearly marked, with the reason stated.

Notices state who is retracting and why. A retraction is not, in itself, a finding of misconduct; the notice distinguishes honest error from misconduct where this is established.

10. Allegations, Appeals and Complaints

Concerns about a submitted or published article may be sent to the editorial office. The corresponding author is contacted and given 21 days to respond; the response is assessed by an editor with no prior involvement; unresolved matters are referred to the authors' institution. Allegations are treated confidentially, authors are given a full opportunity to respond before any notice is published, and anonymous reports are considered on their evidence.

Authors may appeal an editorial decision in writing to the Editor-in-Chief, addressing the substance of the points raised. Appeals are considered by an editor not involved in the original decision. Complaints about the conduct of the editorial process are acknowledged within at the soonest time and answered by the Editor-in-Chief.

11. Commercial Considerations

The journal accepts advertising subject to the following conditions. Where advertising is accepted, it is independent of editorial content, is not linked to any specific article, and advertisers have no influence on editorial decisions. The journal does not engage in unsolicited direct marketing to authors, and does not solicit submissions through mass email campaigns.

12. Open Access, Copyright and Fees

Articles are published open access with no subscription or registration requirement. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal a licence to publish; articles appear under a [CC BY 4.0 ] licence. The journal charges no submission, processing or publication fee, and accepts no payment in exchange for publication.

13. Contact

Ethical concerns, allegations and appeals: editor@pediatricsnursology.com