Scientific Integrity

Aging Biology meets the highest standards and scientific and publishing integrity. Although not currently a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Aging Biology adheres to all such codes of publishing conduct and expects the same of its contributing authors.

The following is a non-exhaustive overview of our publishing code of conduct for contributing authors.

Human subjects

All studies with human subjects should be approved by recognized local/institutional and national oversight bodies, including but not limited to informed consent, subject selection, experimental protocol and data confidentiality and anonymization.

Animal studies

All animal studies should be approved by recognized local/institutional and national oversight bodies, including but not limited to management of pain and distress, reduction of the number of animals used, consideration of sex as a biological variable, ethical culling of animals.

Data availability

All data directly contributing to the publication should be made available on publication. This includes primary data to facilitate re-analysis of datasets and/or for comparison with other datasets. Large datasets should be made available at the time of publication, e.g. through GEO (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/).

Resource sharing

Biological reagents and other resources generated and published through the study should be made available on request to other researchers. This includes plasmids, antibodies, animal models and computational code. Resources can be shared through public repositories, such as Addgene (https://www.addgene.org) and JAX (https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-and-services).

Image manipulation

Images and data should not be adjusted prior to MS submission or publication in any way that might be judged to alter the interpretation of that data. Any image adjustment, such as brightness and contrast, should be applied to the entire image as not to enhance selectively controls versus experimental samples. Ideally, data should be collected at the instrument – with all settings recorded – and not subsequently electronically or otherwise altered in Photoshop, PowerPoint, Illustrator etc, except for image cropping. Images, e.g. lanes from Western blots, should not be spliced together to appear as one original image. All raw data, including uncropped images, should be available during and after the review process for additional assessment.

Authorship

Authors are those who made substantial contributions to the results reported in the MS. All listed authors should have made such a contribution and all those who made such a contribution can be expected to be listed as authors.

Competing interest

Authors should declare any competing or conflicting interests in the Cover Letter at the time of MS submission and these interests should be declared in the final acknowledgements section of the MS.

Plagiarism

All results, data and text reported in the MS should be original to the MS, unless reasonably noted otherwise. For example, already-published large-datasets can be re-analyzed in the MS, provided the original data source is cited. Plagiarism criteria apply equally to the authors’ own previous work and the work of other authors.

Artificial Intelligence

AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are acceptable at all stages of MS production, hypothesis generation, data analysis and manuscript writing. However, AI tools cannot be authors and so responsibility for any AI contributions is that of the listed authors, ultimately the senior/corresponding author. Results of AI writing tools should be verified for potential plagiarism, as this also is the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure of funding sources

All sources of funding for the research, whether government, corporate, foundational, philanthropic or personal should be reported in the acknowledgements section.