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A 10-year follow up of publishing ethics in China: what is new and what is unchanged
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

A 10-year follow up of publishing ethics in China: what is new and what is unchanged

Katrina A. Bramstedt and Jun Xu
Research integrity and peer review, Vol.4(1), pp.17-17
09/02/2019
DOI: 10.1186/s41073-019-0077-3
PMCID: PMC6717980
PMID: 31497313
url
https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-019-0077-3View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

BackgroundOrgan donation and transplantation in China are ethically complex due to questionable informed consent and the use of prisoners as donors. Publishing works from China can be problematic. The objective of this study was to perform a 10-year follow up on Chinese journals active in donation and transplant publishing regarding the evolution of their publishing guidelines.MethodsEleven Chinese journals were analyzed for 7 properties: (1) ethics committee approval; (2) procedure consent; (3) publishing consent; (4) authorship criteria; (5) conflict of interest; (6) duplicate publication; and (7) data integrity. Results were compared with our 2008 study data. Additionally, open access status, impact factor, and MEDLINE-indexing were explored.ResultsMost journals heightened the ethical requirements for publishing, compared to the results of 2008. All 11 now require their published manuscripts to have data integrity. Ten of 11 require ethics committee approval and informed consent for the publication of research studies, whereas in the original study only 2 journals evidenced these requirements. Nine of 11 have criteria for authorship, require conflict of interest disclosure, and forbid duplicate publishing. None of the journals have a policy to exclude data that was obtained from unethical organ donation practices. Nine of 11 journals are MEDLINE-indexed but only 2 are open-access.ConclusionsMost journals have improved their general ethical publishing requirements but none address unethical organ donation practices.
Arts & Humanities Ethics History & Philosophy Of Science Social Sciences Social Sciences - Other Topics

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