This research aims to analyze the ethical requirements and to find the problems for the publication guidelines of oriental medicine journals. A total of 13 domestic journals, related to oriental medicine and registered in ‘National Research Foundation of Korea’ list, were selected for the analysis of ethical requirements. We inquired the revised year of the publication guideline and the status of ethics committee of selected journals. The ethical requirements of publication guidelines were evaluated by categorizing them into Institutional Review Board(IRB), Helsinki Declaration, Informed Consent, confidentiality and anonymity of subjects, and conflict of interest. In the case of revised year of the publication guidelines, the year of the most recently revised journal was 2011. However, the revised year of publication guidelines were not announced for three journals and a few journals haven’t revised the publication guidelines since 2002. In the case of ethics committee status, four journals out of 13 journals maintained the ethics committee. In the result of ethical requirement analysis, nine journals included the information for confidentiality and anonymity of subjects, and four journals included the information for Helsinki Declaration and Informed Consent. However, only one journal included the information for IRB and conflict of interest. Recently, the importance of clinical researches has been increased to prove the effect of oriental medicine scientifically and objectively. The clinical researches should be considered in scientific side and ethical side as well, because they have potential risks to human subjects. In this sense, announcing the ethical requirements in the publication guidelines can be one way to secure the morality of researches. Thus, it is required to prepare correct publication guidelines and ethical requirements in oriental medicine journals. |
