Consensus statement on the adoption of the COPE guidelines

We the undersigned editors of the member journals of the Surgery Journal Editors Group (SJEG), in the furtherance of integrity in surgical and scientific publication, agree to adopt the guidelines established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) [1]. The COPE guidelines represent a means of addressing a variety of ethical concerns, including duplicate publication and authorship misconduct issues, which have, unfortunately, become more prevalent. This statement is being simultaneously published in the respective journals of the members of the Surgery Journal Editors Group, as follows: