Ethics and Patient Consent

Informed consent and patient details
Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent, which should be documented in the paper. Appropriate consents, permissions and releases must be obtained where an author wishes to include case details or other personal information or images of patients and any other individuals. Written consents must be retained by the author and copies of the consents or evidence that such consents have been obtained must be provided to the Owner on request. Unless you have written permission from the patient (or, where applicable, the next of kin), the personal details of any patient included in any part of the article and in any supplementary materials (including all illustrations and videos) must be removed before submission.
Please also refer to COPE guidelines: https://publicationethics.org/

Human and animal rights
If the work involves the use of human subjects, the author should ensure that the work described has been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans; Uniform Requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. Authors should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.
All animal experiments should comply with the ARRIVE guidelines and should be carried out in accordance with the U.K. Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, 1986 and associated guidelines, EU Directive 2010/63/EU for animal experiments, or the National Institutes of Health guide for the care and use of Laboratory animals (NIH Publications No. 8023, revised 1978) and the authors should clearly indicate in the manuscript that such guidelines have been followed.
Journal acts according to the COPE Best Practice Guidelines: https://publicationethics.org/

Clinical trials
Pol Ann Med supports the position of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the journal ‘will not consider results posted in the same primary clinical trials register in which the initial registration resides as previous publication if the results are presented in the form of a brief, structured (<500 words) abstract or table.’
Authors are required to follow Update on Trials Registration Clinical Trial Registration available at http://www.icmje.org/news-and-editorials/clincial_trial_reg_jun2007.html

Randomized controlled trials should be presented according to the CONSORT guidelines. The details and checklist to be included in the paper are available at http://www.consort-statement.org/
In case of the registration of clinical trials, authors are required to follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors instruction available at http://www.icmje.org/
The clinical trial registration number should be included in the manuscript.
As per ICMJE, a clinical trial is any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome. Health-related interventions are those used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome; examples include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, educational programs, dietary interventions, quality improvement interventions, and process-of-care changes. Health outcomes are any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants, including pharmacokinetic measures and adverse events. The ICMJE does not define the timing of first participant enrollment, but best practice dictates registration by the time of first participant consent.