ICMJE Recommendations

Manuscripts for submission to LIFE should be prepared according to the following instructions. LIFE follows the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf) from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION ETHICS

The journal adheres to the guidelines and best practices published by professional organizations, including ICMJE Recommendations and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (joint statement by the Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE; the Directory of Open Access Journals; the World Association of Medical Editors; and Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association; https://doaj.org/bestpractice). Furthermore, procedures for handling research and publication misconduct shall follow the applicable COPE flowchart (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts).

 
Conflict-of-Interest Statement
The corresponding author must inform the editor of any potential conflicts of interest that could influence the authors’ interpretation of the data. Examples of potential conflicts of interest are financial support from, or connections to, pharmaceutical companies, political pressure from interest groups, and academically related issues. In particular, all sources of funding applicable to the study should be explicitly stated.
 
Authorship and Author’s Responsibility
Authors are responsible for the entire content of each article. Co-authorship should be based on the following four criteria: (1) substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; (2) drafting of the work or revising 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 and ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. If any person does not meet the above mentioned criteria, they may be placed as contributors in the Acknowledgments section.
Each author must affirm that they participated in and contributed sufficiently to the work to take public responsibility for the following: (1) conception and design, (2) data acquisition, (3) analysis of data, (4) drafting of the manuscript, (5) critical revision, (6) obtaining funding, (7) administrative support, or (8) supervision. Each author’s role should be addressed on the title page.
The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, providing ethics committee approval, providing clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly met, although these duties may be delegated to one or more coauthors. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely manner and should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information if questions about the paper arise after publication.
Description of co-first authors or co-corresponding authors is also accepted if the corresponding author believes that they contributed equally.
 
Originality and Duplicate Publication
All submitted manuscripts should be original and should not be under consideration by other scientific journals for publication at the same time. No part of the accepted manuscript should be duplicated in any other scientific journal without the permission of the Editorial Board. If duplicate publication related to the papers of this journal is detected, the authors will be announced in the journal, their institutions will be informed, and the authors will be penalized.
 
Secondary Publication
It is possible to republish manuscripts if the manuscripts satisfy the secondary publication conditions of the ICMJE Recommendations (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).
 
Registration of Clinical Trial Research
Any research that deals with a clinical trial should be registered with a primary national clinical trial registration site, or other primary national registry sites accredited by the World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en/) or ClinicalTrial.gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov/), a service of the US National Institutes of Health.
 
Data Sharing Statement
LIFE accepts the ICMJE Recommendations for data sharing statement policy (http://icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf). 
 
Statement of Informed Consent and Institutional Review Board Approval
Copies of written informed consent and Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for clinical research should be kept. If necessary, the editor or reviewers may request copies of these documents to resolve questions about IRB approval and study conduct.
 
Statement of Human and Animal Rights
Clinical research should be conducted in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). Clinical studies that do not meet the Helsinki Declaration will not be considered for publication. Human subjects should not be identifiable, and patients’ names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, or other protected healthcare information should not be disclosed. For animal subjects, research should be performed based on the National or Institutional Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and the ethical treatment of all experimental animals should be maintained.
 
Process to Manage the Research and Publication Misconduct
When the journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, ethical problem with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, complaints against editors, etc., the resolution process will follow the COPE flowchart (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The discussion and decision regarding the suspected cases are done by the Editorial Board.
 
Editorial Responsibilities
The Editorial Board will continuously work for monitoring/safeguarding publication ethics: provision of guidelines for retracting articles; maintenance of the integrity of the academic record; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards; publication of corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed; warranty of no plagiarism and no fraudulent data. The Editorial Board checks manuscripts to confirm the originality of text through Similarity Check. If the similarity index value is unexpectedly high, it will be screened more precisely for plagiarism or duplicate publication. Editors have the following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article; confirmation of no conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept; acceptance of a paper when reasonably certain; promotion of publication of correction or retraction when errors are found; preservation of anonymity of reviewers.