Editorial Policies

Every listed author must have contributed substantively to the work and must approve the submitted version. Contributors who do not meet authorship criteria are named in the acknowledgments with their permission. Changes to the author list after submission require the written agreement of all authors.

Research involving human participants requires approval from a named research ethics committee or institutional review board, and informed consent from participants. The approving body and the approval reference are reported in the manuscript. Identifiable patient information, including images and case details, requires written consent to publish.

Interventional clinical trials must be registered in an accepted public trial registry at or before the first participant provides consent for enrollment. The registry name, registration number, and registration date must be reported in the manuscript.

Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. Where participant confidentiality prevents open deposit, the statement says so and describes the conditions under which the data can be obtained. Clinical data are never required to be released in a form that could identify a participant.

All authors disclose financial and non-financial competing interests, including employment, consultancy, honoraria, patents and personal relationships bearing on the work. Funding sources are named, with the role of the funder in the study stated.

Submissions must be original and not under consideration elsewhere. Manuscripts are screened with Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate; a similarity report is read by an editor in context rather than applied as an automatic threshold. Reuse of the authors' own earlier text must be disclosed and attributed, and permission is required for third-party material.

Authors disclose any use of generative AI tools in preparing a manuscript, naming the tool and describing what it was used for. AI tools cannot be listed as authors, and the authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the work.

Reporting follows the guideline that matches the study design. Depression outcomes should be measured with validated instruments, and the manuscript should state the instrument, the timing, the handling of missing data and the statistical rationale. Consult the instructions for authors for preparation guidance.

Authors and readers who identify an error should notify the editorial office promptly. The journal issues a correction where an error affects part of a work, and a retraction where findings are no longer reliable. Corrections and retraction notices are published, linked to the original article, and are themselves permanent: the original is never silently removed or rewritten.

Concerns about integrity, authorship, ethics approval or data in a published article are investigated by the editorial office with the authors and, where appropriate, their institution. The journal follows COPE-aligned practice in handling them.

An author who believes a decision rested on a misunderstanding may appeal in writing to the editorial office, setting out the specific points at issue. An appeal is considered by an editor not involved in the original decision. Complaints about editorial process or conduct are directed to the same address and are handled separately from the manuscript.

Authors should contact the editorial office promptly and wait for written confirmation before submitting the work elsewhere. Manuscripts withdrawn within 3 days of submission are not subject to a withdrawal charge. Manuscripts withdrawn more than 3 days after submission incur a withdrawal charge equal to 30% of the journal's APC. Authors must receive official withdrawal confirmation before submitting the manuscript to another journal. The same terms are on the article processing charges page.

Personal data supplied during submission are used to operate peer review and publication and are not disclosed for unrelated purposes. Participant data in manuscripts remain confidential to the editorial process. The publisher's privacy statement sets out how personal data are handled across the platform.

Articles are published under CC BY 4.0 with copyright retained by the authors. Preservation and identifier arrangements are described on the indexing page.