Protection of people and animals
Confidentiality and informed consent
Privacy
Randomized clinical trials: description and registration
Funding
Conflicts of interest
Authorship
Rights procurement
Plagiarism
Corrections and retractions
Copyright and authors’ rights
Data protection
The journal follows the best practice guidelines described by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Here we detail briefly all points. For more information, please, visit the official website on Core practices from COPE.
Protection of people and animals
All studies involving data, procedures, treatments, etc. in humans must have written authorization from an ethics committee of the participating institution, which must be attached to the manuscripts submitted on the platform, in addition to following the ethical guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Association, available at: https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/.
Studies reporting animal experiments must comply with the ARRIVE guidelines and be performed in accordance with the United Kingdom Animal (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and current national legislation (Royal Decree 53/2013 of 1 February, on basic standards for the protection of experimental animals), and the European Union Directive 2010/63/EU for animals used for scientific purposes, or the guidelines on the care and use of laboratory animals of the National Institutes of Health (NIH Publications, revised 2011).
Authors must clearly state in the section "Methods" that they have followed these guidelines and procedures have been carried out after obtaining they suitable authorization by the ethics committee of their institution.
Confidentiality and informed consent
Authors are responsible for following the protocols established by their respective health centers to access the data of the clinical files in order to carry out this type of scientific research, for which they must declare compliance with this requirement. The author must guarantee that he/she is in possession of the written informed consent for the participation of each subject in the study.
The authors should mention in the section "Methods" that the procedures performed on the study subjects were carried out after obtaining informed consent out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki for experiments involving humans and the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.
Privacy
The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring the right to privacy of patients by protecting their identity both in the text of the article and in the images. Do not use names, initials, or hospital medical record numbers (or any other type of data irrelevant to the investigation that could identify the patient) or in the text or the photographs; unless such information is essential for scientific purposes.
Randomized clinical trials: description and registration
Randomized clinical trials should be presented according to the CONSORT guidelines. At manuscript submission, authors must provide the CONSORT checklist accompanied by a flow diagram illustrating patients’ progress through the trial, e.g., recruitment, enrollment, randomization, withdrawal, and completion, as well as a detailed description of the randomization procedure. The CONSORT checklist and template flow diagram are available from the CONSORT website.
Registration in a public trials registry is a condition for publication of clinical trials in this journal, in accordance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommendations. Trials must be registered at or before the start of patient enrollment. The clinical trial registration number should be included at the end of the abstract of the article.
- A clinical trial is defined as 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.
Funding
Authors must identify institutions that have provided financial support for the performance of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in data collection, analysis, and interpretation; in drafting the manuscript; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement, then this should be stated.
Conflicts of interest
All authors must complete the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors conflict of interest form, available at: http://www.icmje.org/downloads/coi_disclosure.pdf.
Declaration of individual conflicts of interest is mandatory at submission of the revised version of the manuscript. During the manuscript submission process, the corresponding author will be responsible for declaring all conflicts of interest related to the article in a specific section for this purpose. If the manuscript is accepted, this information will be included in the final article in a new section entitled Conflicts of interest.
Authorship
Everyone listed as an author should meet our criteria for authorship. Everyone who meets our criteria for authorship must be listed as an author.
The journal follows the criteria established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. The requirements for authorship are:
- Substantial contributions to the conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of the study data that has resulted in the manuscript.
- Drafting the article or revising it critically.
- Final approval of the version to be published.
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Authors must meet all four conditions to be listed. The correspondence author is responsible for ensuring that all co-authors meet the requirements for authorship. Each author agrees that the corresponding author will be responsible for submitting the manuscript to the journal. By submitting this manuscript, each of the authors indicates that they have had full access to all the data in this study and assume full and public responsibility for the integrity and accuracy of the data analysis.
Authors wishing to specify the contributions of one or more of the contributing authors within the article must complete the author contributions form and send it with their manuscript.
Authors are advised to carefully review the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript at the time of the original submission. Any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of authors’ names in the authorship list should be made through the authorship modification form, providing:
a) the reason for the change in author list,
b) written confirmation from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal, or rearrangement.
Addition or removal of authors must include confirmation from the author being added or removed. The completed form must be sent through the manuscript management system together with the new version of the article using the Cover letter menu item.
The editor assigned to the manuscript will individually review each case. If the manuscript has already been accepted, the editor will consider the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of authors only in exceptional circumstances. While the editor considers the request, the publication of the manuscript will be suspended.
In case of collective authorship, the names of the writers or the ones responsible for the work followed by "and the Group ..." will be included when all the members of the group consider themselves co-authors of the work. If the name of the group is to be included, even if not all of its members are considered co-authors, the responsible authors will be mentioned followed by "on behalf of the Group ..." or "by the Group ...". In any case, the names and institutions of the members of the group will be included in an attachment at the end of the manuscript.
Contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be mentioned in the Acknowledgments. It is expected that those being acknowledged have given their permission to be named.
The journal declines any responsibility on possible conflicts derived from the authorship of the works that are published in it.
Rights procurement
Authors must declare that the content of their manuscript is original and that it has not been published previously, nor has it been sent or submitted for consideration in any other publication format, either in its entirety or in any of its parts. The opposite constitutes a serious breach of scientific ethics.
In the same way, authors who reproduce previously published materials (text, tables, or figures) in their article are responsible for obtaining the appropriate permits to reproduce those materials in our journal. The corresponding author must obtain written authorization from the copyright’s holder of such materials and send a copy to our journal.
Plagiarism
The journal does not accept previously published material and will not consider for publication manuscripts that are sent simultaneously to other journals, nor redundant or duplicate publications, that is, articles that substantially overlap another already published, printed or electronic media. Authors must inform in the cover letter about previous postings or publications of the same work, in whole or in part, that may be considered redundant or duplicate publication. It is necessary to quote and include the reference(s) of these previous publications in the new manuscript. These restrictions are not applicable to published abstracts of communications, papers, or conferences presented at national or international scientific meetings.
If plagiarism is detected during the peer review process, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we may issue a correction or retract the paper, as appropriate. We reserve the right to inform authors' institutions about plagiarism detected either before or after publication.
To verify originality, the manuscript may be checked by the originality detection service Similarity-Check. This service is available to the publisher as a member of Crossref, through access to the powerful plagiarism detection software Turnitin, iThenticate.
Corrections and retractions
The journal publishes corrections, retractions, and expressions of concern as appropriate, and as quickly as possible. We follow the ICMJE and COPE guidelines where applicable.
The journal also uses CrossMark service. By applying the CrossMark logo to each publication, the journal is committed to maintaining the most up-to-date version and to alerting readers to changes if they occur.
Copyright and authors’ rights
Acceptance of a manuscript for publication implies automatic transfer of rights to the Spanish Society of Internal Medicine (SEMI).
Authors may reproduce abstracts or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. The publisher’s permission (please request it at permanyer@permanyer.com) is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations.
If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included (including figures and tables), the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners (send a copy to our journal), credit the source(s) in the article and include it in the references section.
Authors and their employers or institutions have certain rights to reuse their work. Please share responsibly.
Data protection
To facilitate article publication, personal data will be entered into an automatic database belonging to the SEMI. Unless otherwise indicated, by submitting their articles, authors expressly authorize that their first name, second name(s), contact address, and e-mail address will be published in the Spanish J Med in order to acknowledge authorship of the article and to assist readers in contacting them.
