If your work involves live subjects (human or animal), you must provide an appropriate ethical statement when submitting your paper.
The most suitable location for this is normally the Methods section of the manuscript.

However, since RDJ uses a double-blind peer review process, authors should not include the ethical statement in the manuscript itself.
Instead, this information must be declared in the Mandatory Author Declaration during submission.

Our editorial team checks all ethical statements to ensure that they are appropriate for the study being reported.
Any manuscript submitted without a clear and suitable ethical statement will be returned to the authors and not processed further until an explicit statement is included.

Ethical Statement Requirements

Authors should include the following points (where applicable) when submitting their paper:

1. Ethics Approval:

   • State the name of the institutional or national research ethics committee/review board that approved the research.

   • Include the approval number or ID if applicable.

   • If the research received a waiver or did not require approval, provide a clear explanation.

2. Animal Research:

   • Indicate which institutional and/or national animal care and use guidelines were followed.

3. Human Research:

   • Confirm that the study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and relevant national or institutional regulations.

   • State that all participants (or their parent/legal guardian for children under 16) provided written informed consent to participate.

   • For research involving identifiable human subjects (including tissue or cell donors), confirm that consent for publication was obtained.

   • If identifiable donors are deceased (e.g., historical samples such as HeLa cells), acknowledge their origin and lack of consent transparently.

4. Clinical Trials:

   • Clinical trial studies should include the trial registration number at the end of the abstract.

Double-Blind Peer Review Submissions

For submissions to RDJ’s double-blind review system:

• Do not include the ethical statement within the manuscript.

• Instead, complete the ethical information section in the submission system (this is not shared with reviewers and does not need anonymization).

• If a reviewer needs to verify the ethical information, they may contact the editorial office directly.

Participant Consent to Publish

Researchers must not publish or share identifiable individual data collected during research without explicit consent from the participant or their representative.

• Informed consent to publish must be obtained from participants (or parents/legal guardians for minors under 16).

• For deceased persons, consent should be granted by the next of kin.

• Authors must confirm that all identifiable individuals were informed of and consented to publication.

Examples of identifying information include:

• Case histories

• Photographs

• Videos

• X-rays

• Genetic pedigrees

To protect participant anonymity, authors do not need to submit proof of consent.
A statement confirming that consent was obtained for all identifiable individuals should instead be declared in the Mandatory Author Declaration.