Experiments Involving Plants & Plant Materials

• Comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines and local legislation for field studies.
• Include statements on permits/licenses in the manuscript.
• Deposit voucher specimens in a public herbarium/collection and provide identifier, repository, and taxon identifier details.
• State who identified the specimen.

Experiments Involving Animals

Research on vertebrates or regulated invertebrates must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines and, where available, be approved by an appropriate ethics committee (see IACUC Central).

• Include an ethics statement naming the committee and approval/reference numbers, or explain exemptions.
• Submissions outside an appropriate ethical framework will not be reviewed.

Experiments Involving Human Subjects

Human research must comply with the Declaration of Helsinki and be approved by an Institutional Review Board or equivalent.

• State the ethics committee name and approval/reference number; detail any granted exemptions.
• Obtain and document informed consent (or guardian consent for minors) for participation and any personally identifiable data.
• Provide documentary evidence of consent on request.

Clinical Trial Registration

IJPP supports improved trial reporting. Authors are recommended to register trials at ClinicalTrials.gov. Include the registration number and date in the manuscript.

Data Sharing Policy

Submission assumes that underlying materials (including relevant raw data) will be made available for non-commercial scientific use without breaching confidentiality. Authors are encouraged to deposit datasets in public repositories or supply them as supplementary files.

Standards for Research in Complementary & Alternative Medicine (CAM)

CAM research should meet the same evidence and rigor standards as conventional medical research.

• All clinical research must comply with international/national standards.
• Treatments/techniques tested in animals and/or humans must have prior objective evidence of therapeutic potential (e.g., in-vitro/cellular work in peer-reviewed literature).
• Manuscripts lacking such evidence may be declined on ethical grounds.

Conflict of Interest Disclosure

Authors must disclose affiliations or financial interests that could influence the work. For reviews, disclose relationships with companies whose products feature prominently (including competitors). If accepted, editors will agree with authors how to communicate disclosures to readers.

Format Provide a separate document titled Conflict of Interest Disclosure with author name(s), signature(s), and manuscript title. If none, state “No conflict of interest.” Editors do not share COI statements with reviewers.

Evaluation of Statistical Treatment of Data

Describe statistical methods/measures in detail and justify the tests used.

Quality Check Reviewers assess statistics; a Statistical Editor on the Editorial Board may also evaluate the analysis.

Authorship & Contribution Criteria

• Substantial contributions to conception/design; acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; drafting or critical revision.
• Approval of the submitted version and accountability for the integrity of the work.
• Changes to authorship require justified requests from the corresponding author before publication; no changes after acceptance.

Managing Accuracy of Citations

• Cite appropriate, relevant, peer-reviewed literature supporting claims.
• Prefer citing original work over reviews that cite the original.
• Avoid excessive or nonessential citations for single points.

Research & Publication Misconduct

Submissions must be original and not under consideration or published elsewhere. IJPP participates in plagiarism detection and follows COPE guidance and ICMJE policies regarding overlapping publications.

• Suspected cases: authors are asked for explanation; if misconduct is confirmed and integrity is undermined, articles may be retracted or corrected.
• Corrections/retractions are linked to the original article and widely indexed; in rare cases content may be removed.
• Data integrity: image manipulation, altering/omitting data points, or removing outliers without justification is serious misconduct. Editors may request raw data; failure to provide may lead to rejection or retraction.

Reviewer Responsibilities

• Submit reviews within ~3 weeks or decline promptly if expertise/conflict is an issue.
• Maintain confidentiality; do not use privileged information for personal advantage.
• Provide objective, constructive feedback; avoid personal criticism.
• Identify missing citations/attributions, major overlaps, or ethical concerns and alert editors.

Editor Responsibilities Toward Authors

• Provide clear policies on authorship and manuscript preparation/submission.
• Treat authors fairly; ensure transparency and timely, constructive decisions.
• Set and enforce COI policies for editors, staff, authors, and reviewers; protect confidentiality.
• Maintain effective, rapid peer-review systems; avoid undue delays.
• Define data/material sharing expectations for reproducibility.
• Offer procedures for decision reconsideration and policies for handling ethical issues/misconduct.
• Coordinate with the publisher to ensure timely publication and clear communication of policies.

Publisher Responsibilities

• Define relationships between publisher, editors, and stakeholders by contract; foster editorial independence.
• Respect privacy; protect IP and copyright.
• Set and periodically review journal policies (COPE-aligned) on ethics, authorship transparency, peer review, appeals/complaints.
• Maintain the academic record; assist investigations of suspected misconduct.
• Publish corrections, clarifications, and retractions; ensure timely content publication.

Publisher: New Century Health Publishers, LLC.

Open Access & Licensing

IJPP provides immediate open access in line with the Budapest Open Access Initiative. All content is freely available to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to full texts without prior permission.

License Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.