The Journal of Dental School policy regarding suspected scientific misconduct including plagiarism fabricated data, falsification, and redundancy is based on the guidelines on good publication practice of the "Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)". The complete guidelines appear on COPE website: http://www.publicationethics.org.uk .

Ethical considerations must be addressed in the Materials and Methods section.

1) Please state that informed consent was obtained from all human adult participants and from the parents or legal guardians of minors. Include the name of the appropriate institutional review board that approved the project.

2) Indicate in the text that the maintenance and care of experimental animals complied with National Institutes of Health guidelines for the humane use of laboratory animals, or those of your Institute or agency.

For studies on human subjects the following should be included:

Randomized Controlled Trial Registry

Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol, assignment of interventions (allocation to groups), and the method of blinding, based on the CONSORT Statement (http://www.consort-statement.org). Authors should provide the registration number at the end of the abstract and in the Materials and Methods part of the text. Registration in one of the following trial registers is accepted:

http://www.actr.org.au/

http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/

http://isrctn.org/

http://www.trialregister.nl/trialreg/index.asp

http://www.umin.ac.jp/ctr

http://www.irct.ir/

Approval by the Ethical Committee of the university/research center is required. All procedures could also be presented in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000”. Also, include that “informed consent was obtained from all patients for participation in the study”.

If any identifying information about patients is included in the article, the following sentence should be added as well:

“Additional informed consent was obtained from all patients for whom identifying information is included in this article”.

For studies on animals the following sentence should be included:

“All institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed”.

For articles that do not contain studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors:

While it is not absolutely necessary, we recommend including the following sentence, just to make sure that readers are aware that there are no ethical issues with human or animal subjects:

“This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors”.