JOURNAL POLICIES

JOURNAL POLICIES

1. Editorial Policies

For submitting a manuscript to PAIN Research, all authors must agree to abide by relevant JASP policies.

1) Peer review policy

Authors can recommend five potential suggested reviewers and five opposed reviewers on online manuscript submission system. Reviewers should be experts with international published experience in the field, and should be able to provide an objective assessment of the manuscript. Our policy is that reviewers should not be assigned to a paper if:

1. The reviewer is based at the same institution as any of the co-authors
2. The reviewer is based at the funding body of the paper
3. The reviewer has published with the authors within the previous three years.
4. The reviewer cannot be found after performing a basic Google search (name, department and institution).

2) Authorship

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have contributed sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. Papers should only be submitted for consideration once consent is given by all contributing authors. Authorship credit should be based on:

1. Substantial contributions to the concept and design, acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data,
2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content,
3. Final approval of the version to be published,

Meeting these criteria should provide each author with sufficient knowledge of and participation in the work that he or she can accept public responsibility for the report.

Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship, although all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. Please refer to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) authorship guidelines for more information on authorship.

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.

3) Copyright

To be considered for publication in PAIN Research, a manuscript cannot have been published previously, nor can it be under review for publication elsewhere. The posting of a brief summary of clinical trial outcomes on a pharmaceutical website will not necessarily count as prior publication nor impede full consideration of a manuscript: The Editors will determine the extent of overlap and decide whether the manuscript contains sufficiently new perspectives or sufficient additional data to count as original. Likewise, the posting of manuscripts to preprint servers will not necessarily count as prior publication. Authors should declare when submitting manuscripts that such data have already been posted.
All content published in PAIN Research is made freely available online to all under an Open Access model. See the “Open Access” section.

4) Funding

PAIN Research requires all authors to acknowledge their fundings in the Declaration section. The authors are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation.

5) Conflicting interests

Conflict of Interest must be considered to prevent ambiguity about financial and personal relationships that might bias the submitted work. All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal, or other relationships with other people or organizations for the past one year prior to submission that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work. This disclosure must be included in Declaration section of the manuscript.
For guidance on conflict of interest statements, please see the ICMJE recommendations.

2. Ethics Policies

Authors submitting manuscripts to PAIN Research are expected to conduct their research in strict accordance with the JASP Policies on Ethics.

PAIN Research recognizes its responsibility to ensure that questions of scientific misconduct or dishonesty in research are adequately pursued. Should scientific misconduct or dishonesty be suspected or alleged, PAIN Research follows the recommended procedures outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

1) Publication ethics

PAIN Research takes issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked using duplication-checking software. Where an article is found to have plagiarised other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article (removing it from the journal); taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author’s institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; banning the author from publication in the journal, or appropriate legal action.

2) Human research

Authors must state that the protocol for the research project has been approved by a suitably constituted Ethics Committee of the institution within which the work was undertaken and that it conforms to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki (as revised in Fortaleza, Brazil, October 2013).
In general, submission of a study in which case are represented should be accompanied by the written consent of the subject (or parent/guardian) before publication. While the Editors recognize that it might not always be possible or appropriate to seek such consent, the onus will be on the authors to demonstrate that this exception applies in their case. The authors must state about the full name and the institution of the review committee with the approval number in the Declaration section of the manuscript as follows:
The protocol for this research project has been approved by the Ethics Committee of [X University] (Date …/Approval No. ….) and it conforms to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki. All informed consent was obtained from the subject(s) and/or guardian(s).

As shown in the Declaration of Helsinki, every research study involving human subjects must be registered in a publicly accessible database before recruitment of the first subject. Thus, any research project that assigns human subjects to intervention or comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome must be registered. Registration of retrospective studies is not required, but authors are encouraged to have official approval from an appropriate ethical committee at submission of the study. The authors must disclose the registry and the number of the registration in the Declaration section.

Clinical trials: Clinical trials are subject to all policies regarding human research. PAIN Research follows the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of a clinical trial: A clinical trial is any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes. Interventions include but are not restricted to drugs, cells, and other biological products, surgical procedures, radiologic procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, preventive care, etc.

All clinical trials must be registered at or before the time of first patient enrollment in any primary registry of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP). Authors must provide the registry name and registry number in the cover letter and methods section.

Papers on clinical trials must adhere to the CONSORT reporting guidelines appropriate to their trial design and provide a completed CONSORT checklist and flow diagram as a figure.

Our policies for clinical trial submissions are designed to promote transparency and reproducibility and ensure the integrity of the reporting of patient-centered trials. Editors and reviewers should carefully review trial protocols and registration details and assess manuscripts according to CONSORT.

3) Animal research

All manuscripts reporting animal studies must include the statement indicating that the protocol and procedures were ethically reviewed and approved, as well as the name of the body giving approval, in the Declaration section of the manuscript. Authors are required to adhere to animal research reporting standards, for example the ARRIVE guidelines for reporting study design and statistical analysis; experimental procedures; experimental animals and housing and husbandry. Descriptions of surgical procedures on animals should include the route of drug administration, drug name, and dose of anesthetic used. Authors must also state whether experiments were performed in accordance with relevant institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals.