The publication processes of the Journal of Health Sciences are carried out on the basis of unbiased evaluation, development, and sharing of qualified scientific articles such as clinical and experimental research articles, original case reports, and literature reviews in various branches of the health field. In this context, the ethical rules that authors, journal editors, referees, and publishers must comply with are carried out in accordance with the guidelines and policies published by the "Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE (https://publicationethics.org/))".

Studies submitted to the Journal of Health Sciences must comply with ethical and scientific standards. The scientific, ethical, and legal responsibilities of the published articles belong to the author(s) and do not reflect the views of the editor, editorial board, and editorial board members.

The journal requires that the articles published in the journal meet high ethical and scientific standards. No commercial product advertisements are included in the articles. No responsibility for the properties and descriptions of the commercial products mentioned in the articles is accepted by the Journal of Health Sciences.

Articles submitted to the Journal of Health Sciences must not have been previously published elsewhere or sent for publication. If there are quoted articles, tables, pictures, etc. in the study, the responsible author of the study must obtain written permission from the owner and authors of the publication rights and indicate this in the study. If the work submitted to the journal complies with the formal principles and the spelling rules of the language in which it is sent, it is reviewed by the editor/field editor and at least three referees and, if deemed necessary, it is published after the requested changes are made by the authors.

In order to publish all prospective and retrospective studies conducted with humans or animals and other studies that require ethics committee approval in accordance with the legislation in force, Ethics Committee Approval must be obtained and the institution, approval number, and date (day-month-year) of Ethics Committee Approval must be specified in the "Materials and Methods" section of the manuscript.

The journal accepts the principle of compliance with the Principles of the Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/ policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles- for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/) in all studies involving human subjects. In the presence of such studies, the authors must state in the "Materials and Methods" section of the study that they conducted the study in accordance with these principles, and that they obtained ethics committee approval and "informed consent" from the people who participated in the study.

"Informed consent" should be obtained from patients in case presentations and this should be stated in the study. It is the responsibility of the authors to obtain consent within the framework of the Law on the Protection of Personal Data and to submit it if requested by the competent authorities.

If there is a direct or indirect commercial connection or financial support for the study, the authors are obliged to inform the editor on the presentation page that they have no commercial relationship with the commercial product, drug, company used or if they have a relationship, what kind of relationship (consultant, other agreements, etc.). The compliance of the studies with ethical rules is the responsibility of the authors.

Journal of Health Sciences is published by Erciyes University Institute of Health Sciences. Ethical responsibilities of the publisher;

- The publisher accepts that the decision-maker and the refereeing process in the process of publishing an article in the Journal of Health Sciences is the responsibility of the editor.

- The publisher provides open, electronic and free access to the journal on the journal's web page.

- The Editorial Board is responsible for the publication of the articles sent to the Journal of Health Sciences for publication and the subsequent processes. The Editor and Editorial Board should act impartially and with the public interest in mind when making decisions about the journal and the published articles.

- The Editorial Board of the Journal of Health Sciences should strive to continuously improve the journal and increase the quality of publication.

- The Editor and Editorial Board should ensure that the articles are evaluated by experts in their fields. The referee list should be constantly renewed and improved according to the referees' areas of expertise.

- Attention should be paid to whether there is a conflict of interest between the referees sent to evaluate the article and the authors.

- The Editor and Editorial Board should ensure that journal policies such as blind refereeing, evaluation process, ethical principles, and publication process are determined and implemented. Information about authors and reviewers should not be disclosed to either party.

- The Editor and Editorial Board should update the publication and writing rules, present them to the authors in an understandable way, and update the sample templates.

- When authors request information about the status of their manuscripts, information about the status of the manuscript should be provided without harming the blind review process.

- It should be checked that the submission and acceptance dates are published in the articles.

- The Editor and Editorial Board should pay attention to the protection of human and animal rights in the articles and reject the article in the absence of ethics committee approval.

Journal of Health Sciences applies the principle of two-way blind reviewing in the article evaluation process. The reviewers cannot communicate directly with the authors, and the manuscript evaluation forms and correction requests are sent to the author(s) through the editor and/or editorial board via the Dergipark management system. Ethical responsibilities of reviewers:

- Reviewers should only accept manuscripts related to their area of expertise.

- Reviewers should evaluate the scientific aspects of the article without taking into account the race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship or political philosophy of the authors, and should attach importance to confidentiality while evaluating.

- Reviewers should refuse to evaluate the manuscript and inform the editor if there is a conflict of interest/conflict of interest with the authors.

- Referees should use academic and constructive language while evaluating the manuscripts and should avoid insulting personal comments.

- The referees should send their opinions on the articles they accept for evaluation to the editor and editorial board within the deadline given to them.

- The author(s) must not have published their manuscript(s) in another journal or submitted their manuscript(s) for publication in another journal at the same time.

- Only the names of the contributing authors should be included in the manuscript (i.e., those who have made significant contributions to the design, conduct, implementation, data collection or analysis/interpretation of the study; those who have contributed to the hypothesis and outline of the study and critically revised it for intellectual content; those who have seen, approved and accepted the final version of the manuscript for publication).

Articles submitted for publication should not be requested to change the order of authors or to add or remove authors.

- The author(s) should cite the sources used during the writing of the article in accordance with ethical principles.

- The author(s) should obtain the necessary ethics committee documents for research articles, and indicate the name of the ethics committee, date and number of the decision in the method section of the article. They should also document similarity reports using the iThenticate (http://www.ithenticate.com/) program. Ethics committee approval documents are not required for reviews.

- When requested, information and raw data about the articles under review should be forwarded to the editor and editorial board.

- The author(s) should inform the editor and editorial board when they realize the error about their article at the evaluation and early view stage or electronically, and contact them to correct or withdraw it.

The articles published in the Journal of Health Sciences are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) International License and permission is granted to share them in accordance with the license terms. All publishing rights of the works accepted for publication belong to the institution publishing the journal. However, the works published in the journal can be used, copied, reproduced and adapted, provided that they are non-commercial, properly cited and comply with the licensing terms mentioned above. The opinions and suggestions in the published

studies are the sole responsibility of the authors. No royalties are paid for the articles published in the journal.

All manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Health Sciences should be scanned by the authors with a licensed application (iThenticate) and the similarity report should be uploaded to the system together with the manuscript files. Acceptable similarity rate is below 20%. Manuscripts with similarity above the specified rate are rejected without evaluation.

- Identification of people who did not contribute intellectually to the study as authors.

- Failure to indicate if the article is derived from the author's master's/doctoral thesis or a project, or if it has been presented anywhere.

- Slicing, i.e. publishing more than one article from a single study.

- Failure to declare conflicts of interest regarding submitted manuscripts.

- Deciphering the process of double-blind arbitration.

Journal of Health Sciences is an open-access journal. The journal provides free access to the issues published online in electronic media and the full texts of the articles in the issues as soon as they are published. The Journal grants all users permission to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to, index, scan, export to software as data or use for any other lawful purpose. No fee is charged to the author(s) for publishing their article(s). Readers can download the journal content free of charge for academic or educational use. The Journal is free to everyone, at any time. To ensure this, the Journal of Health Sciences utilizes the free article evaluation/online publication system of the DergiPark platform and the ongoing voluntary efforts of the editors/referees.