Publication and authorship

• References should be complied numerically according to the order of citation in the text in the Vancouver style. The numbers of references should not preferably exceed 40 for original articles, 15 for brief, and 8 for case reports.

• A statement should be included in the title page indicating any financial support the authors had received.

• The authors are not allowed to utilize verbatim text of previously published papers or manuscripts submitted elsewhere.

• Authors should sign a copyright form stating that the article is an original work, has not been published before and is not being considered for publication elsewhere in its final form either in printed or electronic form. The submitted manuscript must not be published in any other journals.

Author's responsibilities

• Authors should actively participate in the peer review process and provide suitable responses to the comments raised by peer reviewers on time.

• All authors must have significantly contributed to the research.

• Authors must state that all data in the article are real and authentic.

• All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.

• Copyright: If a manuscript contains any previous published image or text, it is the responsibility of the author to obtain authorization from copyright holders. The author is required to obtain and submit the written original permission letters for all copyrighted material used in his/her manuscripts.

Peer review/responsibility for the reviewers

• Judgments should be objective;

• Reviewers should have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the research funders;

• Reviewers should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited;

• Reviewed articles should be treated confidentially.

• Reviewers should advise editors and the final decision on an article is made by the Editors-in-Chief.

• Reviewers should provide constructive comments to improve the quality of the article.

Editorial responsibilities

• The Editors-in-Chief have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.

• Editors should have no conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept.

• When errors are found in a manuscript, the editors promote publication of correction or retraction

• The anonymity of reviewers is preserved.

Publishing ethics issues

• The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). COPE’s flowcharts and guidelines are approached upon confronting any ethical misbehavior.

• The TiPS uses the COPE flowchart for retraction of a published article (http://publicationethics.org//resources/guidelines)

• All patients and participants of the research should be thoroughly informed about the aims of the study and any possible side effects of the drugs and intervention. Written informed consent from the participants or their legal guardians is necessary for any such studies. The Journal reserves the right to request the related documents.

• The TiPS precludes business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards.

• The Editors-in-Chief are always willing to publish corrections, clarifications.

• Plagiarism: Use of verbatim texts from other sources without acknowledgement is prohibited. The content of all articles must be the original work of authors and must not be plagiarized from other articles.

• Data falsification/fabrication: Falsification is the practice of omitting or altering research materials, data, or processes so that the results of the research are no longer accurately reflected. Fabrication is the practice of inventing data or results and reporting them in the research. Both of these misconducts are fraudulent and seriously alter the integrity of research. Therefore, articles must be written based on original data and use of falsified or fabricated data is strongly prohibited.

• Image manipulation: TheTiPS encourages authors to send their original images. All digital images in manuscripts accepted for publication will be checked for inappropriate manipulation. No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable as long as they are applied to the entire image and do not misrepresent any information present in the original, including the background. The editors will request the original data from the authors to compare the manipulated figures in cases suspected of inappropriate manipulation.