We closely follow the industry associations, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), that set standards and provide guidelines for best practices to meet these requirements. Any research that involves humans in any stage of the work must be conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). Manuscripts describing experimental work which carries a risk of harm to human subjects must include a statement that the experiment was conducted with the human subjects’ understanding and consent, as well as a statement that the responsible Ethical Committee has approved the research methodology. In the case of any animal experiments, the authors must provide a full description of any anesthetic or surgical procedure used, as well as evidence that all possible steps were taken to avoid animal suffering at each stage of the experiment. All animal research must follow the ARRIVE guidelines.

A statement to ethical approval must be appeared in the methods section of the manuscript, including the name of the body from which approval has been provided, with a reference number where appropriate. Informed consent must also be documented. For all articles that include information or clinical photographs relating to individual patients, written and signed consent from each patient to publish must also be made available if requested by the editorial board. The involvement of scientific (medical) writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be acknowledged, along with their source of funding. JKAHS requires authors to declare any competing financial or other interest in relation to their work. All competing interests that are declared will be listed at the end of published articles. Where an author provides no competing interests, the listing will read 'The author(s) declare that they have no competing interests.

JKAHS encourages all authors to follow the reporting guidelines to maximize the transparency and reproducibility of their research by using appropriate reporting guidelines while preparing their manuscripts. Our reviewers and editors are also encouraged to use the guidelines during the article processing and peer-review processes as well.  The reporting guidelines are available on the website of equator network (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research; https://equator-network.org)   We particularly encourage the use of the following guidelines:

• CONSORT guidelines for Randomized Controlled Trials
• TREND guidelines for non-randomized trials
• PRISMAguidelines for systematic review and meta-analyses
• CAREguidelines for case reports
• STROBE guidelines for observational studies
• STREGA guidelines for genetic association studies
• SRQR guidelines for qualitative studies
• STARD guidelines for diagnostic accuracy studies
• ARRIVE guidelines for animal experiments

Policy to Handle Research Misconduct

Cases of suspected research misconduct including data falsification, data fabrication, data manipulation, authorship misconduct and plagiarism are handled as per the spirit of COPE guidelines. JKAHS does not accept use of Artificial Inteligence (AI) tools including ChatGPT, Google Bard, image creator or similar while preparing the manuscript. 
PLAGIARISM POLICY
Plagiarism is an act of copying someone's theories, ideas, or statements without giving the explicit acknowledgement to the author of the original source. It is assumed unethical in scientific writing. The editorial board of Karnali Academy of Health Sciences (JKAHS) will not accept the manuscript with plagiarism in any form. We have established the following policy stating specific actions (penalties) when plagiarism is identified in an article that is submitted for the publication in JKAHS.

Every manuscript submitted to JKAHS must be original, unpublished, and not even pending for the publication in other journals. Any text with someone's view, idea, findings should be explicitly acknowledged and any photograph, figure and graphic material reproduced from another source should be presented with permission from the person or copyright holder.

Identification of Plagiarism
We use online plagiarism checker software to check for plagiarism in all submitted manuscripts. On the basis of the result obtained from the software, the Managing Editor will decide whether to proceed for further editorial process or reject the manuscript. When plagiarism is identified, the Managing Editor will review the manuscript and find out the degree of plagiarism under the following guideline and the Editor-in-Chief will take action accordingly. 

1. Plagiarism Offense Type I (Minor Offense): If some portion (complete sentence) of any article is plagiarized without significant data or idea, then it is assumed to have minor plagiarism offence.
Penalties: The author is asked to rewrite the plagiarized contents of the manuscript with proper citation.

2. Plagiarism Offense Type II (Intermediate Offense): If a significant portion (less than 35% of the total content) of any article is plagiarized without significant data or idea, then it is assumed to have intermediate plagiarism offence. 
Penalties: The submitted article is rejected and the author(s) is/are not allowed to resubmit the manuscript. 

3. Plagiarism Offense Type III (Severe Offense): If a significant portion (more than 35% of the total content) of any article is plagiarized with significant data or idea, then it is considered to have severe plagiarism offence. 
Penalties: The paper is rejected and the author(s) is/are kept in the blacklist for 3 to 10 years of time depending on the severity of the plagiarism.