Rhinology Online promotes transparency in all our policies and processes, and upholds the highest ethical standards in medical research in our field.

Transparency

Funding

All sources of funding should be declared in a separate ‘Funding’ statement at the end of the article. Details of which aspects of the study received funding should also be declared, i.e. research design, execution, analysis, interpretation, reporting.

Registering clinical trials

Clinical trials must be prospectively registered in a publicly accessible database, such as www.clinicaltrials.gov or www.clinicaltrialsregister.eu. Include the name of the trial register and your clinical trial registration number at the end of the article abstract.

Reporting guidelines

Please refer to the reporting guidelines from the EQUATOR Network, to enable readers of your article to properly evaluate your methods and results and come to their own conclusions.

Clinical trials and randomized trials should be reported according to CONSORT guidelines.

Review articles should should be reported according to PRISMA guidelines.

Study Protocols should be reported according to SPIRIT guidelines.

Case histories should be reported according to CARE guidelines.

Authorship and contributorship

Please describe the individual contributions of each author to your article. As per the ICMJE recommendations, to be listed as an author, you must have made significant contribution to the design and execution of the article, including:

• acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data
• drafts and revisions during the writing process
• final approval of the article before submission to Rhinology Online

As a listed author, you are also expected to be accountable for the accuracy and integrity of your part of the work undertaken.

Contributors who do not meet the above criteria should be credited in the Acknowledgements section.

Conflicts of interest / competing interests

Where an author’s private / other interests could be seen to have an impact on the objectivity and conclusions of their article this should be declared in the Conflict of Interest statement.

If no conflict of interest exists, the authors should also state this.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

• include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
• include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval. If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Consent for publication

If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

You can use your institutional consent form or any other consent form that you prefer. The consent form should contain a signature of the patient/parent/ guardian/relative. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

Please keep this consent form in the patient’s case files. The manuscript reporting this patient’s details should state that ‘Written informed consent for publication of their clinical details and/or clinical images was obtained from the patient/parent/guardian/relative of the patient. A copy of the consent form is available for review by the Editor of this journal.

If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Ethical oversight

The Rhinology Online Editorial Board have a responsibility to prevent unethical practice and protect patients. As such, the Editors will carefully consider the moral justification for each article. They will assess factors such as potential burden and/or risks to patients; benefits to patients and society; to what extent the research conclusions deviate from accepted clinical practice.

If there are any concerns regarding these points, we may request further explanation from the authors’, and in some cases from their institution and/or research ethics committee.

When making a judgement, the Editors will take into account factors such as differing local resources and standards for health care and research, whereby different ethical standards will apply. In such cases the final decision to publish will be based on a carefulconsideration of the context of the study, and the potential benefit to society.

All submissions to Rhinology Online will be handled in confidence by editors and reviewers.

Intellectual property

Permissions

It is the author’s responsibility to gain permission to reproduce any figures or tables in full or in part. Please provide evidence that permission has been granted where relevant.

Copyright

As Rhinology Online is an Open Access journal, all articles are covered by the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0in order to meet the terms of open access publication and ensure the widest possible dissemination.

Data sharing and reproducibility

Rhinology Online meteorqq strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible.

Availability of data and materials

All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

• The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
• The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
• The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
• The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
• Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs.

Post-publication discussions and corrections

In cases where editors or reviewers raise concerns about the ethical integrity of an article we reserve the right to take one of the following courses of action, as deemed appropriate:

• Publication of a correction.
• Retraction of published article.
• Refusal of future submission.
• Notification of misconduct sent to an author’s institution and/or ethics committee.

Any changes to the list of authors should be submitted to the editorial office for consideration along with a valid explanation for the change. All authors should be in agreement about any such update. Pre-publication the editors will approve any such changes on a case-by-case basis. Post-publication changes to the list of authors will typically need to be made with a published correction, and will again be considered on a case-by-case basis by the editorial board.

Plagiarism

The Office of Research Integrity (https://ori.hhs.gov/) defines plagiarism as the "theft or misappropriation of intellectual property and the substantial unattributed textual copying of another's work".

Authors must therefore ensure any paraphrasing and summarising of the work of others is properly attributed and cited.

Self-plagiarism refers to reusing one's own prior work without acknowledgement. This includes recycling text that has been previously published; submitting the same article to different publications; or reporting results of one study in separate publications when one would suffice. Once again, please therefore ensure that any summarising or paraphrasing of the author's own work is cited appropriately.

All papers submitted to Rhinology Online will be screened for plagiarism by iThenticate's advanced plagiarism detection software.

In line with guidelines from COPE (https://publicationethics.org/), if plagiarism is identified or suspected in a Rhinology Online article, we will contact the corresponding author with our findings. In clear cases of plagiarism of large sections of text, the submission will be rejected and all authors will be informed of this decision. If the case is deemed serious enough, we may also refer this to the author's institution. If the plagiarism is deemed minor (i.e. no misattribution of data) we will work with the author to ensure appropriate attribution and citation and the paper will continue through the review process.

If plagiarism is detected in an article which has already been published, the article will be retracted and a retraction statement will be added to the website.

Complaints and appeals

Any complaints about the handling of your article or appeals against an editorial decision should be addressed to editorialmanager@rhinologyonline.org in the first instance.

Repository policy

Authors are permitted to deposit the submitted, accepted and published version of their article in an institutional or other repository of the author's choice without embargo.

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