Ethical statements

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, to preserve anonymity in double-anonymous journals please do not add the ethical statement to the manuscript, instead complete the relevant section on the submission system.

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

Authors should include the following points in the ethical statement (if applicable) when submitting a paper:

• The institutional or national research ethics committee /review board that approved the research must be named. Include the approval number/ID if one was given. If the research received a waiver of approval from the ethics committee/review board or did not require approval for some other reason please state this and explain why.
• For investigations involving animal experimentation you should state which institutional and/or national animal care and use guidelines were followed.
• For investigations involving human participants:
  • You should state that the research was conducted in accordance with the principles embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki and in accordance with local statutory requirements.
  • You should state that all participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) gave written informed consent to participate in the study
  • For research which involves identifiable human subjects (including donors of cells or tissues) you must include a statement confirming that consent was given for publication by all participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16). In order to protect participant anonymity, authors do not need to send proof of this consent to us at IOP Publishing. Where a donor has deceased prior to the research and is therefore unable to grant consent but is still identifiable (e.g. HeLa cells), their origin and lack of consent should be acknowledged.
• Articles relying on clinical trials should quote the trial registration number at the end of the abstract. IOP also encourages the registration of such studies in a public trials registry prior to participants being enrolled.

Ethics Gen Tool

Our free Ethics Generator Tool helps authors to provide correctly worded ethics statements to match the statement criteria of an author’s journal of choice. EthicsGen enhances the publishing experience for our authors, reviewers and readers, increase efficiency and speed, and supports our commitment to deliver the highest integrity standards.

When a statement is complete, the user can copy the text to the clipboard or download it as a file, then paste into the appropriate section on the submission form.

Double-anonymous submissions

• In double-anonymous journals please do not add the ethical statement to the manuscript, instead please complete the relevant section on the submission system. This information is not shared with reviewers and therefore does not need to be anonymised.
• If a reviewer feels they need to see an ethical statement, they are advised to contact the journal to discuss.