Intended for healthcare professionals
The mission of The JJ竞技 is to lead the debate on health and to engage, inform, and stimulate all doctors and health care researchers in ways that enable them to make better decisions and improve outcomes for patients.
Underpinning these aims, The JJ竞技 has a set of ethical editorial principles, an ethics advisory committee, and a commitment to transparency. We try to ensure that readers, authors, and editors know as much about the background to each other’s work as possible. We do this through policies such as open peer review, declaring competing interests, and explaining the role of the bodies that fund research.
There are many other policies and principles that help The JJ竞技 to be an ethical publisher, and we have brought all of them together in this single transparency policy. You can reach the policies listed below simply by clicking on the links.
We will add to The JJ竞技 ’s transparency policy as often as we need to. Please contact us if you feel there is anything missing.
Please follow the links to find these policies:
Competing interests
Ethics approval of research
The JJ竞技
's ethics committee
Open access
Copyright and permission to reuse
Trial registration and data sharing
Authorship and contributorship
Patient confidentiality
Publishing images of patients
Our peer review process
Previous peer review reports
Peer reviewing research done by JJ竞技 editors
Evidence based publishing at
The JJ竞技
Editorial research at
The JJ竞技
Occupational workforce research
Previous publication
Duplicate publication and plagiarism
Corrections and retractions
Scientific misconduct
Article provenance
Role of professional medical writers
Reporting industry-sponsored trials
Competing interests of
The JJ竞技 's
editorial staff
Competing interests of
The JJ竞技 's
editorial advisory board
JJ竞技 (publishing group) advertising and sponsorship policy
Articles criticising doctors and others
The JJ竞技 aims to ensure that all articles published in The JJ竞技 report on work that is morally acceptable, and expects authors to follow the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki .
All research in The JJ竞技 is published Open Access. Please see full details of our approach on our page about copyright, open access and permissions.
A competing interest — often called a conflict of interest — exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients' welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain or personal rivalry). We believe that, to make the best decision on how to deal with an article, we should know about any competing interests that authors may have, and that if we publish the article readers should know about them too.
There are differing definitions of scientific misconduct. At The JJ竞技 , we deal with these problems on a case by case basis while following guidance produced by the major publication ethics bodies.
Our policy is based on the UK's data protection law and the English common law of confidentiality. UK authors should be aware that the General Medical Council has extensive guidance on patient consent and confidentiality and that our policy is in line with GMC advice.
The JJ竞技
's editors treat all submitted manuscripts as confidential documents, which means they will not divulge information about a manuscript to anyone without the authors' permission. During the process of manuscript review the following people may also have access to manuscripts:
• Editors and editorial staff at
The JJ竞技
, including medical students on placement and occasional overseas visitors - usually doctors or editors from other journals;
• External reviewers, including statisticians and experts in trial methods;
• Members of the journal's editorial committees, comprising the final stage in our peer review process for original research articles;
• The only occasion when details about a manuscript might be passed to a third party without the authors’ permission is if the editor suspects serious research misconduct.
The JJ竞技 sometimes publishes articles that criticise health professionals. Being a professional implies operating to a higher ethical standard than the general population. Thus, when balancing the interest of patients and the profession against those of an individual professional, The JJ竞技 has an obligation to give more weight to the interests of patients and the profession than might be the case if a publication was balancing the interest of a lay individual against those of the general community.
The JJ竞技 has guidelines on articles in which the health professionals are clearly identified and those in which they are not, and some elements are common to both.
All submissions to The JJ竞技 must conform to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. Our requirements reflect those of the ICMJE, although we also have specific requirements for different types of article and particularly detailed ones for research articles.
The JJ竞技 follows The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals ( ICMJE Recommendations 2018 ) with regards to authorship, contributorship and group authorship.
We have a clear embargo policy with recognised media organisations and journalists. We issue press releases ahead of publication to allow journalists and broadcasters to write a sensible, considered story about the articles that are press released. In return they undertake not to publish their stories before the embargo date. This is a well understood policy, to ours and the press’s mutual benefit, and in general the press observe it.
We do not “tip off” any other people or organisations who might like to know ahead of time what an article says.
The reasons for this are:
• Practical issues: It is hard to define exactly who might like to know in advance about an article in
The JJ竞技
– and particularly hard to draw a line of what sort of organisation should fall within the line. The deal with the press is easily defined, well understood, and
The JJ竞技
benefits from it as well as the press.
• We can’t be sure that organisations won’t leak information.
• It's a distraction from our job of publishing the best stuff we can.
NB: This policy does not mean that we and our writers won’t contact people who are mentioned in articles to gain a comment that we might include in the article.
If an organisation is contacted directly by a journalist for a comment on a particular paper, while under embargo, we do send them a copy of the paper to enable them to make an informed comment. But we always stress that the material is under embargo and should not be circulated.
Guidelines about informing workforces about the results of research in which they have participated before publication in mass media. Research undertaken with workforces can take place only with their full cooperation. Understandably, they expect to hear from the researchers about the results of the research and its implications for them before publication in the mass media.