Why the guidelines were developed COPE was founded in 1997 to address breaches of research and publication ethics. A voluntary body providing a discussion forum and advice for scientific editors, it aims to find practical ways of dealing with the issues, and to develop good practice. We thought it essential to attempt to define best practice in the ethics of scientific publishing. These guideli...

OBJECTIVE To analyze ethical standards considered by health-related scientific journals, and to prepare the Ethics Requirement Score, a bibliometric index to be applied to scientific healthcare journals in order to evaluate criteria for ethics in scientific publication. METHODS Journals related to healthcare selected by the Journal of Citation Reports™ 2010 database were considered as experim...