Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Policies

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

 

The ethical framework governing every party involved in publishing with this journal.

Radiology Research Journal (RRJ) is committed to upholding the highest standards of publication ethics. This statement applies to all parties involved in the act of publishing — authors, editors, peer reviewers, and the publisher — and takes effect from the moment a manuscript is submitted.

The journal's policies and procedures are built upon internationally recognised standards:

COPE Core Practices ICMJE Recommendations Declaration of Helsinki WAME Principles DOAJ Principles of Transparency CIOMS International Ethical Guidelines ARRIVE Guidelines (animal research) KEPK / institutional ethics committees (Indonesia)
1. Authorship and Contributorship

Authorship is reserved for those who have made a substantial intellectual contribution. In line with the ICMJE Recommendations, each named author must satisfy all four of the following criteria:

Criterion 1
Substantial contribution to conception or design, or to acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data.
Criterion 2
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
Criterion 3
Final approval of the version to be published.
Criterion 4
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including the integrity and accuracy of any part of it.

Contributors who do not meet all four criteria — for example those who provided technical support, image acquisition, funding, general supervision, or language editing — must be named in the Acknowledgements with their permission, not listed as authors. Authors are required to submit a CRediT contributor statement specifying each individual's role.

Prohibited Authorship Practices
Guest or honorary authorship — naming a senior figure who did not contribute substantially.
Gift authorship — naming a colleague as a favour or in exchange for reciprocal listing.
Ghost authorship — omitting someone who made a substantial contribution, including professional medical writers.
Purchased authorship — any arrangement in which authorship is bought, sold, or brokered through a third party or paper mill.
Artificial intelligence as author — AI tools cannot satisfy the accountability criterion and must never be listed as an author.

Changes to authorship after submission — addition, removal, or reordering — require a written request to the Editor-in-Chief signed by all authors, including the individual being added or removed, stating the reason for the change. Requests received after acceptance are granted only in exceptional circumstances and may delay publication. Disputes that cannot be resolved between the authors are referred to their institutions; the journal does not adjudicate authorship disputes.

2. Research Ethics Approval
Research Involving Human Participants
All studies involving human participants, human data, or human tissue must comply with the Declaration of Helsinki and be approved by a recognised research ethics committee (KEPK, IRB, or equivalent) before the research begins. The manuscript must state the name of the approving committee and the approval number and date in the Methods section. Studies lacking this information will be returned without review.
Retrospective Imaging Studies
Retrospective analyses of existing imaging archives still require ethics committee review. Where the committee has granted a formal waiver of informed consent, the waiver and its reference number must be stated. A waiver granted by the authors themselves, or an assumption that archived images need no approval, is not acceptable.
Animal Research
Studies involving vertebrates or regulated invertebrates must report approval by an institutional animal care and use committee, the applicable national legislation, and compliance with the ARRIVE 2.0 guidelines. Radiation dose, anaesthesia, analgesia, and humane endpoints must be described in full.
Clinical Trials
Trials must be prospectively registered in a WHO-recognised public registry (for example ClinicalTrials.gov or INA-Registry) before enrolment of the first participant. The registry name and trial identifier must appear in the abstract. Reporting must follow CONSORT, with the protocol supplied on request.

Authors are also expected to follow the reporting guideline appropriate to their study design: STROBE (observational), PRISMA (systematic reviews and meta-analyses), PRISMA-ScR (scoping reviews), STARD (diagnostic accuracy), CARE (case reports), TRIPOD+AI and CLAIM (prediction models and artificial intelligence in medical imaging), and SQUIRE (quality improvement). A completed checklist should accompany the submission.

3. Informed Consent and Patient Privacy in Imaging
Why this matters especially in imaging

Medical images are not anonymous by default. DICOM headers carry patient identifiers, institutional details, and examination timestamps; annotations may be burned into the pixel data; and volumetric CT or MRI datasets of the head can be surface-rendered into a recognisable face. Authors carry the responsibility of ensuring that no submitted image, in any form, can be traced to an individual.

De-identification Requirements
Strip all DICOM metadata, including private tags and structured report fields.
Remove burned-in annotations, patient names, medical record numbers, and dates.
Apply defacing or skull-stripping to three-dimensional head datasets before sharing.
Remove implanted device serial numbers visible on the image.
Do not mask identifiers with a black rectangle in a layered file format — the underlying pixels remain recoverable.
Written Consent
Written informed consent for publication is mandatory for all case reports and case series.
Consent is required whenever a rare condition, unusual anatomy, or combination of details could identify a patient even without a name.
Consent must be obtained from the legal guardian for minors and from the next of kin for deceased patients.
The patient should be shown the manuscript before submission where practicable.
The signed form is retained by the authors and produced on request; do not upload it with the manuscript.

Non-essential identifying details must never be altered or fabricated in an attempt to achieve anonymity, as this constitutes falsification of the scientific record. If anonymity cannot be guaranteed, consent is the only acceptable basis for publication.

4. Data and Image Integrity
Acceptable Image Adjustment
Linear adjustment of brightness, contrast, or window level applied uniformly to the entire image.
Cropping, provided it does not remove context that alters interpretation.
Addition of clearly visible arrows, labels, or scale bars.
Standard reconstruction described fully in the Methods.
Prohibited Manipulation
Enhancing, obscuring, moving, removing, or introducing any specific feature.
Selective adjustment applied to one region of an image only.
Cloning, splicing, or duplicating a region within or between figures.
Reusing the same image to represent different patients, timepoints, or conditions.
Presenting a synthetic or AI-generated image as an authentic clinical image.

Authors must retain the unprocessed source images and raw data for a minimum of five years after publication and supply them to the editorial office on request. Refusal or inability to produce source data when a concern is raised may itself result in rejection or retraction. The journal reserves the right to screen figures for duplication and manipulation.

5. Competing Interests and Funding

All authors, reviewers, and editors must disclose any interest that could be perceived to influence their judgement. Disclosure is required regardless of whether the individual believes the interest actually affected the work; the test is whether a reasonable reader would want to know.

Financial — employment, consultancy, honoraria, equipment loans, travel support, stock, patents, expert testimony.
Commercial — relationships with manufacturers of imaging equipment, contrast agents, or software evaluated in the study.
Personal or academic — close collaboration, shared institution, mentorship, or personal rivalry with those involved.
Institutional — departmental or organisational interests in the outcome of the research.

Every manuscript must contain a Competing Interests statement (or the explicit declaration that none exist) and a Funding statement naming each funder and grant number, together with a description of the funder's role in the design, conduct, analysis, or decision to publish. Where a funder had no such role, this must be stated.

6. Originality, Redundancy, and Preprints
Original and Exclusive Submission
Submission implies that the work is original, has not been published elsewhere in any language, and is not under consideration by another journal. Simultaneous submission is a serious breach and results in immediate rejection and notification of the authors' institutions.
Redundant Publication and Text Recycling
Dividing one study into multiple similar papers ("salami slicing") is not permitted. Reuse of an author's own previously published text must be cited and kept to the minimum necessary, typically limited to descriptions of established methods.
Preprints Are Permitted
Posting on a recognised preprint server before or during review is welcomed and does not count as prior publication. Authors must disclose the preprint DOI at submission and are asked to link the preprint to the final published article after acceptance.
Conference Abstracts
Prior presentation as a conference abstract or poster does not preclude submission, provided the abstract is cited and the full paper represents a substantial expansion of it.
7. Data Availability and Reproducibility

Every article must include a Data Availability Statement. The journal encourages, but does not mandate, deposit of datasets in a public repository. Where imaging data cannot be shared openly for reasons of patient confidentiality, the statement must say so explicitly and describe the conditions under which access may be granted.

Acceptable forms of statement
Data are openly available in [repository] at [DOI or accession number].
De-identified data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request, subject to approval by [ethics committee].
Data cannot be shared publicly because of [specific restriction]; enquiries may be directed to [contact].
All data supporting the findings are contained within the article and its supplementary files.

Where a study develops or evaluates an algorithm, authors are expected to describe the training, validation, and test datasets, report performance with confidence intervals, and state whether code or trained model weights are available. See the journal's Generative AI Policy for the full requirements applying to artificial intelligence in imaging research.

8. Research and Publication Misconduct

The journal treats the following as misconduct: fabrication or falsification of data or images, plagiarism in any form, undisclosed duplicate publication, unethical research conduct, breach of patient confidentiality, authorship manipulation, citation manipulation, undisclosed competing interests, undisclosed use of generative artificial intelligence, peer review manipulation including suggestion of fictitious reviewers, and any involvement with a paper mill.

STEP 1
A concern is raised by a reader, reviewer, editor, or screening tool and recorded by the editorial office.
STEP 2
The Editor-in-Chief assesses the concern against the relevant COPE flowchart and decides whether it warrants investigation.
STEP 3
The corresponding author is contacted in confidence and given a reasonable opportunity to respond with evidence.
STEP 4
If the response is unsatisfactory, the authors' institution or funder is notified and asked to investigate.
STEP 5
Where publication cannot safely wait for that outcome, an Expression of Concern is published.
STEP 6
A correction, retraction, or dismissal of the concern is issued, and the outcome is recorded permanently.

Sanctions available to the journal include rejection of the manuscript, retraction of a published article, notification of the authors' institutions and funders, notification of other journals where relevant, and a ban on submission by the authors concerned for a defined period. Allegations may be submitted confidentially to [EDITORIAL EMAIL]; the journal protects the identity of anyone raising a concern in good faith and investigates the substance of an allegation regardless of its source, including anonymous reports.

Editorial Independence and Accountability

Editorial decisions are based solely on the scientific merit of the work and are never influenced by the authors' nationality, institution, seniority, gender, ethnicity, religion, or political position, nor by any commercial or institutional interest of the publisher. The Editor-in-Chief holds final responsibility for what the journal publishes and for the correction of the record when that is required.

Radiology Research Journal (RRJ) · Publication Ethics Policy · Version 1.0, [MONTH YEAR] · Reviewed annually