Clear standards for peer review, ethics, authorship and responsible AI use.

Peer review

• All submissions undergo editorial screening for scope, completeness, ethical requirements and minimum scientific quality.
• Suitable research manuscripts are normally sent to two independent external reviewers whenever feasible.
• Authors and reviewers do not know each other’s identities. The editorial office manages the process and preserves confidentiality.
• Editors with a conflict of interest must not make decisions on the affected manuscript.

Research ethics and consent

• Research involving humans must report ethics committee approval or a documented justification for exemption.
• Clinical trials must include prospective registration information when required by applicable standards.
• Case reports and identifiable patient material require appropriate consent for publication.
• Animal studies must include the relevant ethical compliance statement.

Authorship, conflicts and integrity

• Authorship follows ICMJE principles; contributorship should be reported using CRediT whenever feasible.
• Financial and non-financial competing interests must be disclosed.
• Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, duplicate publication and inappropriate manipulation of scientific images are not acceptable.
• Submitted work must be original and not simultaneously under consideration by another journal, except where transparent policies permit preprints.

Artificial intelligence-assisted technologies

PULSE Research uses a risk-based framework: AI may support scholarly work, but accountability and scientific judgement remain human.

Required disclosure

Authors must disclose the tool, provider, model/version, date or period of use, purpose, part of the work affected, and how the output was checked by humans. Material analytic or coding assistance must be described in sufficient detail to allow editorial assessment and reproducibility.

Reviewers and editors

Manuscripts are confidential. Reviewers and editors must not upload submitted manuscripts to public or unsecured AI tools. Peer-review or editorial judgement cannot be delegated to AI.

Data, transparency and reporting

• Original research should include a data availability statement.
• Clinical trials should include the appropriate registration and data-sharing statements when applicable.
• Authors should follow the relevant EQUATOR reporting guideline and provide the checklist when requested.

Open access and charges

PULSE Research operates as a Diamond Open Access journal: readers do not pay to access published content and authors are not charged article processing charges (APCs).

The final copyright and reuse license will be stated on published articles once the institutional license framework is formally approved.