Ethical issues in instructions to authors of journals in oral-craniomaxillofacial/facial plastic surgery and related specialties.

International audienceBACKGROUND: Ethical standards of biomedical publications are associated with editorial leadership, such as contents of instructions to authors and journal's mechanisms for research and publication ethics. OBJECTIVES: To compare ethical issues in the guidelines for authors in oral-craniomaxillofacial/facial plastic surgery (OCM-FPS) journals with those in plastic surgery and otorhinolaryngology/head and neck surgery (ORL-HNS) journals, and to evaluate the relationship between journal's impact factor (IF) and ethical issues in the instructions to authors. METHODS: This study used a cross-sectional study design. The predictor variables were journal's specialty and IF. The outcome variable was the presence of seven ethical issues in the online versions of journal's instructions to authors in October 2009. We included only journals with identifiable IF for 2008, published in English, French, German and Thai. Appropriate descriptive and univariate statistics were computed for all study variables. The level of statistical significance was set at P