Conflicts of Interest and Finantial Disclosure

The ICMJE states that: “A conflict of interest exists when a professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain).” Financial relationships are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and include employment, consultancies, stock ownership and options, honoraria, patents and paid expert testimony. Authors should declare any financial conflict of interest at the moment of manuscript submission. The ICMJE form is available at (http://www.icmje.org/conflicts-of-interest/) and should be used for declaration of conflicts of interest at the time of manuscript submission. However, conflicts of interests can also occur for other reasons such as personal relationships, academic competition, rivalries and intellectual beliefs. In this context, authors should also declare any kind of non-financial relationship (personal, academic, ideological, intellectual, politic o religious) that could cause a conflict of interest for the author. In case authors do not declare conflicts of interest, it should be stated: “authors declare they do not have any conflict of interest”. Each author must fill the conflict of interest form and the Corresponding author will summit all together at the time of manuscript submission.

At the moment of manuscript submission authors should declare the origin and nature of all funds (public or private) used to accomplish their work, including data collection and analysis, or even manuscript preparation. Donations of technical equipment such as radiology and sonography equipment, pressure platforms, etc., for the accomplishment of the study will not be considered financial aid. In that case, donations of deliveries should be cited in the acknowledgements of the manuscript.