Ethics and Disclosures

BJHMR is a COPE member and follows the ICMJE recommendations. All submissions must meet recognised standards of research and publication ethics. The declarations below must appear in your manuscript after the main text, before the references; state “None” or “Not applicable” where relevant, but do not omit them. The journal’s full policies are available under the Policies menu.

Authorship and contributor roles (CRediT)

Authorship should be based on the ICMJE criteria: a substantial contribution to the work; drafting or critical revision for important intellectual content; approval of the final version; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Record each author’s role using the CRediT taxonomy. Contributors who do not meet all criteria should be acknowledged, with their permission. The corresponding author warrants that all co-authors have approved the submission. Generative-AI tools cannot be authors. The corresponding author must provide an ORCID iD; co-authors are strongly encouraged to do so.

Research ethics and approval

Research involving human participants, their data or their tissue must be conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and all applicable national and institutional requirements, and must have been approved by an appropriately constituted research ethics committee or institutional review board. State the name of the approving body and the reference number, or explain clearly why approval was not required. Research involving animals must comply with relevant welfare legislation and institutional approval and be reported in line with the ARRIVE guidelines.

Informed consent and patient privacy

Obtain and document the informed consent of participants to take part in the research. For any case report, case series, or identifiable patient information, image or detail, obtain written informed consent to publish from the patient (or next of kin); consent must cover open-access publication under a Creative Commons licence. Do not submit identifying details that are not essential, and protect the confidentiality and anonymity of participants throughout.

Clinical-trial registration

Clinical trials must be registered prospectively, before enrolment of the first participant, in a registry that meets the standards of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform or the ICMJE (for example ISRCTN or ClinicalTrials.gov). Provide the registry name and registration number in the abstract and on the title page.

Conflicts of interest and funding

Declare all financial and non-financial relationships that could be perceived to influence the work — for example funding, consultancies, honoraria, patents, share ownership, or paid advisory roles, particularly with pharmaceutical, device or other commercial organisations — or state that none exists. Disclose all sources of funding, including grant numbers, and the role of the funder in the design, conduct, analysis, interpretation or reporting of the study. The journal follows the ICMJE approach to disclosure.

Data availability

Include a Data Availability Statement describing whether, and how, the data supporting the results can be accessed, consistent with participant consent, confidentiality and applicable law. Where data can be shared, deposit de-identified data in a recognised, citable repository with a persistent identifier; where they cannot, explain why. For clinical trials, describe any plan for sharing individual participant data.

Use of generative AI

Disclose any substantive use of generative-AI tools, naming the tool and version and describing how it was used. Authors remain fully responsible for all content, must verify AI-assisted output, and must not use AI to fabricate or manipulate data, results or images, or to generate clinical content that has not been verified.

Originality and integrity

Manuscripts must be original and properly attributed, and are screened with similarity-detection software. Plagiarism, text recycling, duplicate or redundant publication (including inappropriate division of a single study into multiple papers), and the fabrication, falsification or manipulation of data or images are not permitted and are handled under the journal’s Publication Ethics policy.