Table of Contents

• 1. Authorship and Contribution
• 2. Disclosure of Conflict of Interest
• 3. Statement of Human and Animal Rights
• 4. Statement of Informed Consent and Institutional Review Board Approval
• 5. Registration of Clinical Trial Research
• 6. Originality and Duplicate Publication
• 7. Secondary Publication
• 8. Process to Manage the Research and Publication Misconduct
• 9. Editorial Responsibilities

1. Authorship and Contribution

1) Author qualifications

According to International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations, authors of a paper must meet the following criteria: (1) make substantial contributions to the conception and design of the study, or to the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; (2) draft the article or critically revise it for significant intellectual content; (3) give final approval of the version to be published; and (4) agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work, ensuring that any questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. All authors should meet all four criteria. The author list should include all relevant contributors and no others, providing proper credit and accountability for each researcher’s contributions.

2) Author contributions statements

Authors must include a statement at the end of the manuscript, under a section titled “Author Contributions,” specifying each author’s role and responsibilities. This requirement applies to all manuscripts, including review articles. Individuals who do not meet the four criteria mentioned above should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgments section as contributors.

3) Authorship changes

Any changes in authorship (adding, removing, or rearranging authors) after the initial manuscript submission must be accompanied by a letter to the editor, signed by all authors. The journal will not correct authorship after publication unless it is due to an editorial error.

4) Role of corresponding author

The corresponding author is primarily responsible for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process. This includes ensuring that all administrative requirements, such as authorship details, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration, and conflict of interest forms, are properly completed. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review stages to respond promptly to editorial queries. After publication, they should be prepared to address critiques and cooperate with any journal requests for data or additional information related to the article.

5) Recommendations for collaborating with personal connections

Authors planning to involve minors (under 19 years old) or family members (such as spouses, children, or relatives) in their research, whether through co-authoring papers or presentations, must clearly disclose this in the cover letter. For more details, please refer to the Guidelines for Preventing Illegitimate Authorship by the National Research Foundation of Korea (https://cre.nrf.re.kr).

2. Disclosure of Conflict of Interest

Authors submitting to the Diabetes & Metabolism Journal must declare all competing interests related to their work. Every manuscript should include a “Conflict of Interest” section at the end, listing any financial or non-financial competing interests. Financial conflicts, such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, and paid expert testimony, are often the most obvious. However, conflicts can also arise from personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion (https://www.icmje.org/conflicts-of-interest). If there are no competing interests, the statement should read, “No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.” For studies sponsored by third parties, authors must describe the sponsor’s role in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, report writing, and the decision to submit the manuscript. If the sponsor had no such involvement, this should be clearly stated. Additionally, potential conflicts of interest of editorial board members should also be disclosed in the manuscript.

3. Statement of Human and Animal Rights

All studies involving humans must adhere to the principles outlined in the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki). For studies involving animal experiments, care and use of animals must comply with national laws and institutional regulations. The ethical treatment of all experimental animals should align with the guidelines provided by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Approval from the relevant animal ethics committee must be documented and available for submission if requested by the editors or reviewers.

4. Statement of Informed Consent and Institutional Review Board Approval

Research involving human subjects, material, or data must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The manuscript should include a statement confirming this approval, with the name of the ethics committee and the reference number. If the study was exempt from requiring ethics approval, this should also be mentioned, including the name of the committee that granted the exemption. During the review process, the Institutional Review Board approval document may be requested, if necessary. For all research involving human subjects, informed consent must be obtained from participants, and a statement confirming this should be included in the manuscript. Identifiable information, such as names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, or other protected healthcare information, should not be disclosed. For animal studies, the manuscript should state that the experimental procedures, including breeding and use of laboratory animals, were approved by the Research Ethics Committee (REC) of the institution where the research was conducted or that they comply with the institution’s REC guidelines or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Authors are required to retain the raw experimental data for at least 1 year after publication and should be prepared to present this data if required by the editorial board.

5. Registration of Clinical Trial Research

Any research involving clinical trials should be registered with a primary national clinical trial registry. This includes registries, such as the Clinical Research Information Service (CRIS; https://cris.nih.go.kr), the World Health Organization Registry Network (https://www.who.int/clinical-trials-registry-platform/network/primary-registries), or ClinicalTrials. gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov), a service of the U.S. NIH. Please ensure that the clinical trial registration number is included on the manuscript’s title page.

6. Originality and Duplicate Publication

Submitted manuscripts must be original and not under consideration for publication in another magazine or journal. No part of the manuscript may be published elsewhere without the editorial board’s permission. Figures and tables can be reused freely if the original source is properly credited under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial License. Authors are required to resolve any copyright issues when citing figures or tables from non-open access journals. All submissions are screened for plagiarism or duplicate publication using Similarity Check (https://www.crossref.org/services/similarity-check). If such issues are found, the journal will be notified, and appropriate penalties may be imposed on the authors, with their affiliated institutions also being informed.

7. Secondary Publication

Manuscripts may be republished if they meet the ICMJE’s criteria for secondary publication (https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/overlapping-publications.html) as follows:

• • Authors must obtain approval from the editors of both journals (the editor handling the secondary publication must have access to the primary version).
• • The primary publication retains priority, with a publication interval agreed upon by the editors of both journals and the authors.
• • The secondary publication is intended for a different audience; an abbreviated version may suffice.
• • The secondary version must accurately reflect the data and interpretations of the primary version.
• • The secondary version must inform readers, peers, and documenting agencies that the paper has been published elsewhere, in whole or in part (e.g., “This article is based on a study first reported in the [journal title, with full reference]”), and must cite the primary reference.
• • The title of the secondary publication should indicate that it is a secondary publication (complete or abridged republication or translation) of a primary publication. Note that the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) does not consider translations as “republications” and does not cite or index them if the original article was published in a Medline-indexed journal.

8. Process to Manage the Research and Publication Misconduct

The Diabetes & Metabolism Journal is a member of Similarity Check’s plagiarism detection initiative and takes all cases of publication misconduct seriously. If the editorial office identifies suspected research and publication misconduct, such as a redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, data fabrication, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and other ethical issues, the resolution process will follow the Committee on Publication Ethics flowcharts. Reviewers are responsible for reporting any suspected issues with a manuscript to the editor. If the investigation confirms scientific misconduct, the article will be retracted. Authors may be invited to prepare the retraction, which must be submitted with a copyright assignment statement signed by all authors. If the paper is unpublished, the editor can reject it outright. Instances of misconduct will be reported to the editorial board, and the editor may impose sanctions, notify editors of other biomedical journals, or, depending on the severity, inform the author’s institution. The journal will not hesitate to publish errata, corrigenda, clarifications, retractions, or apologies when the misconduct is confirmed.

9. Editorial Responsibilities

The editorial board is committed to upholding high publication ethics standards. This includes providing clear guidelines for retracting articles, preserving the integrity of academic records, prioritizing intellectual and ethical standards over commercial interests, and publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, or apologies as needed. Editors are responsible for accepting or rejecting articles, avoiding conflicts of interest, promoting corrections or retractions when errors are identified, and preserving reviewer anonymity.