Ethical Considerations in Publishing Medical Articles in Iranian Journals

Abstract

Summary Publication ethics has always been a major concern of chief editors and members of editorial boards of journals. Therefore, the current study intends to investigate ethical issues in sticking to publication ethics in major medical journals in Iran. This descriptive analytical study was conducted on Iranian medical journals approved as “scientific research journals” published from 2011 to 2012; the sample included 109 articles from 102 journals published in Persian. For data gathering, a checklist was developed, and completed through careful scrutiny of the articles and contact with authors. Ethical misconducts were recorded and summarized to compute the misconduct cases. Ethical misconducts included lack of the ethics committee approval (81.7%), unstated informed consent (45%), authors with insufficient contribution (46.8%), dispute on the order of authors (84.4%), honor authors (8.3%), ghost authors (6.4%), salami publishing (10.1%), concurrent submission (4.6%), missing acknowledgements (49.5%) and not mentioning the financial support providers (56.9%). The results indicated that some ethical considerations are ignored in publishing medical articles. Therefore, both journals and authors need to take action to avoid misconducts.