Research Ethics and Compliance

This policy describes the ethical standards applied to research material that TICH publishes, summarizes, or supports through its editorial systems.

It applies to contributors submitting original research, analyses, reviews, or commentary, as well as editors and reviewers handling such material.

Our handling of human research content is informed by widely recognized ethical frameworks, including the general principles of the Declaration of Helsinki and the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) guidance, where applicable. We reference these principles as guiding standards; we do not act as an ethics review board and do not issue formal ethical approvals.

• Studies involving human participants should have been conducted with appropriate ethics committee or institutional review board oversight, and authors are expected to state this.
• Informed consent should be obtained for participant-level data, with documentation available on reasonable request.
• Personal identifiers must be removed from data shared in submissions.
• Use of secondary data should respect the original data source's terms and applicable legal requirements.

• Direct identifiers (names, contact details, identifying numbers) are removed before analysis or publication.
• Small-cell suppression and aggregation are used to limit re-identification risk in tables and figures.
• Where datasets are shared, accompanying documentation describes anonymization steps.

When working with publicly available or shared datasets, contributors should respect the original license, attribute the source, and clearly state any limitations introduced by the data structure or collection method.

• Plagiarism, data fabrication, and undisclosed conflicts of interest are not accepted.
• Concerns raised about published material are reviewed using a structured editorial process aligned with COPE principles, where applicable.
• Where issues are confirmed, corrections, expressions of concern, or retractions are issued and recorded on the affected article.

Contributors are responsible for the ethical conduct of the underlying research. Editors and reviewers are responsible for applying these standards consistently within the editorial process.