For the policies on research and publication ethics not stated in the Instruction, the guidelines of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE; https://publicationethics.org/) or Good Publication Practice Guidelines for Medical Journals (https://kamje.or.kr/) should be applied.

Research ethics

Manuscripts with the following misconduct or dishonest acts cannot be published either online or in the journal.

• • Forgery (fabrication): recording or reporting on made-up data or research results that do not exist.
• • Alteration (falsification): manipulating research data, equipment, processes, or results intentionally to distort research contents or results.
• • Plagiarism: using others’ ideas, research processes, contents, and/or results without proper authorization or citations.

Statement of human and animal rights and informed consent

Any investigations involving humans or animals should be approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) or the Animal Care Committee, respectively, of the institution(s) where the research was conducted. CE will not consider publishing any reports on studies involving humans or animals which have not received appropriate approval. Informed consent should be obtained from patients who participated in the clinical investigations, unless the relevant IRB waived this requirement. Human subjects' names, initials, hospitals, dates of birth, or other personal or identifying information should not be used. Images of human subjects should not be used unless the information is essential for scientific purposes, and explicit permission has been provided. Even when consent is provided, identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, authors should ensure that such alterations do not distort scientific meaning. If consent has not been obtained, it is generally insufficient to anonymize a photograph simply by using eye bars or blurring the face of the individual concerned. If the experiments involve animals, the research should be based on national or institutional guidelines for animal care and use. A statement describing whether the study was conducted with the approval of the IRB (with or without patient informed consent) or animal care committee must be provided in manuscripts describing human or animal research, respectively. CE may also request documentation of approval by the IRB or the Animal Care Committee for other types of articles when necessary. The content of each article is the responsibility of the authors and not of CE.

Originality and duplicate publication

Manuscripts that are under review or published by other journals will not be accepted for publication in CE. Any part of the accepted manuscript should not be duplicated in any other scientific journal without permission from the Editorial Board, although the figures and tables can be used freely if the original source is verified according to the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). It is mandatory for all authors to resolve any copyright issues when citing a figure or table from another journal that is not open access.

Secondary publication

It is possible to republish the manuscript if it satisfies the condition of secondary publication of the recommendations from the ICMJE (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/overlapping-publications.html).

Authorship

All authors must have made a significant intellectual contribution to the manuscript according to the criteria formulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Each author should have sufficiently participated in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should be based on (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (3) final approval of the version to be published; and (4) 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. All authors should meet criteria 1, 2, 3, and 4. All authors must state that they have approved the final submitted draft.

• • Author contributions: Author contributions should be written according to "Contributor Roles in CRediT" format (https://casrai.org/credit/).
• • Contributors: Any researcher who does not meet all four ICMJE criteria for authorship discussed above but contributes substantively to the study in terms of idea development, manuscript writing, conducting research, data analysis, and financial support should have their contributions listed in the Acknowledgments section of the article.
• • Correction of authorship: Any changes to the author list after submission, such as a change in the order of the authors or the deletion or addition of authors, should only be made before the manuscript has been accepted and must be approved by the Editor. To request such a change, the Editor must receive the following from the corresponding author: (a) an explanation for the change to the author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal, or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed.
• • Role of the corresponding author: The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements are met, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer-review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely manner, and after publication, should be available to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data, additional information, or questions about the article.

Registration of clinical trial research

Any research involving a clinical trial should be registered with a primary national clinical trial registration site such as CRIS (https://cris.nih.go.kr/cris/index/index.do) or other primary national registry sites accredited by the World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/clinical-trials-registry-platform) or clinicaltrials.gov (http://clinicaltrials.gov/), a service of the United States National Institutes of Health.

Conflicts of interest

A conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author’s institution), reviewer, or editor has financial or personal relationships that inappropriately influence (bias) their actions (such relationships are also known as dual commitments, competing interests, or competing loyalties). The impact of these relationships can vary from being negligible to having a great potential for influencing reporting or judgment. Not all relationships represent true conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, the potential for a conflict of interest can exist regardless of whether an individual believes that the relationship affects their scientific judgment. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and are the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, authors, and science itself. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion (http://www.icmje.org/conflicts-of-interest/). Authors must disclose any potential conflicts of interest in the manuscript. Conflicts of interest may occur during the research process; however, disclosure itself is an important point that can negate the conflict. Disclosure allows the editors, reviewers, and readers to approach the manuscript with an understanding of the situation in which the research work was performed.

Management of research and publication misconduct

When the journal faces suspected cases of research or publication misconduct, such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, the use of fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, ethical problems with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, or complaints against editors, a resolution process will be undertaken. The resolution process will follow the flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). Discussions and decisions regarding suspected cases of research or publication misconduct will be conducted by the Editorial Board.

Editorial responsibilities

The Editorial Board will continuously work to monitor and safeguard publication ethics through guidelines for retracting articles; the maintenance of the integrity of the academic record; ensuring that business needs do not compromise intellectual or ethical standards; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed; and ensuring that there is no plagiarism or fraudulent data in publications. Editors have the following responsibilities: the responsibility and authority to reject/accept articles, to ensure the absence of conflicts of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept, the acceptance of a paper when reasonably certain, the publication of corrections or retractions when errors are found, and the preservation of the anonymity of reviewers.