Q: Will an international journal accept informed consent written in Japanese?
I have a question about informed consent for case reports. I have obtained a general consent from all patients. This is written in Japanese, collected from all hospitalization cases, and agrees to the use of clinical data, test data, and graphic data for both conference or journal publication purposes. Can this be considered as an agreement for the actual manuscript submission? If a target journal accepts a Japanese format, should I obtain informed consent once again?
If you have obtained a written informed consent that agrees to the use of clinical data, it can be considered as an agreement for the actual manuscript submission in a target journal. Most international journals accept informed consent written in other languages. However, some journals may ask for a translation of the document from authorized translators.
Usually the same informed consent can be used for all journal submissions. I don't think you will need to obtain informed consent once again unless your target journal has some spceific requirements which are not satisfied by the format in which you have obtained informed consent.
Related reading:
- Do we have to use journal-specific informed consent forms for case reports?
- Protecting the identity of enrolled subjects in case reports and clinical trials
