INDEXING & ABSTRACTING

1. Indexing & Digital Interoperability

The Pakistan Journal of Clinical Research (PJCR) distributes its metadata to international discovery networks and scholarly repositories. Every article is assigned a permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) at the point of online publication.

  • Persistent Identifiers: Crossref (DOI Prefix: 10.65761)

  • Scholarly Discovery Engines: Google Scholar, BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

  • Open Metadata Registries: OpenAlex, Scilit

  • Open Access Directories: ROAD (Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources – UNESCO)

Metadata Harvesting: Operating on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) architecture, the journal natively supports the standardized OAI-PMH protocol, enabling automated metadata crawling by international library catalogs and global abstracting services.

2. Access, Licensing, & Copyright Retention

PJCR operates under a Gold Open Access model. All content is immediately and permanently free to the public upon online publication.

  • Open Access Statement: There are no subscription paywalls, digital barriers, embargo periods, or mandatory registration requirements to read, download, print, distribute, or link to published articles.

  • Licensing Policy: All published works are issued under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

  • User Rights: Third parties are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to full texts, crawl for indexing, use as data for software, or remix and build upon the material for any lawful purpose (including commercial use), provided the original authors receive clear attribution.

  • Copyright Ownership: Authors retain full, unrestricted, and unconditional copyright and publishing rights to their work without any transfer clauses or exclusivity restrictions.

3. Publishing Ethics & Scientific Integrity

A. Core Authorship & ICMJE Compliance

All submissions must comply with the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Authorship must meet all four core ICMJE criteria. All authors must explicitly disclose all potential financial, institutional, or personal conflicts of interest during submission.

B. Misconduct & COPE Governance

The journal operates in strict accordance with the principles and systematic flowcharts of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Pre-review screening is systematically conducted via Turnitin. The journal enforces a zero-tolerance policy for:

  • Plagiarism, text-recycling, self-plagiarism, and duplicate/redundant submissions.

  • Data fabrication, falsification, and digital image manipulation.

  • Citation manipulation, guest, ghost, or gift authorship.

C. Safeguards & Trial Registration

  • Human & Animal Subjects: Research involving human participants, medical records, or tissue must comply with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki. The manuscript must explicitly cite the approval reference number from a recognized Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Ethical Review Committee (ERC), and documented informed consent must be secured. Animal studies must strictly adhere to the ARRIVE guidelines.

  • Clinical Trial Mandate: In compliance with ICMJE directives, prospective registration of clinical trials in a primary registry recognized by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) or ClinicalTrials.gov is highly encouraged and must be declared within the methodology section.