Clinical Trial Policy

Clinical Trial Registration

The Pakistan Journal of Occupational Therapy and Health (PJOTH) adheres to the highest standards of transparency and scientific rigor in reporting interventional research. Authors submitting Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are strongly encouraged to comply with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations on clinical trial registration.

PJOTH adopts the World Health Organization (WHO) definition of a clinical trial, which refers to:

“Any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes.”

This includes all Phase I–IV trials, regardless of intervention type. Health-related interventions are defined as any action used to alter biomedical or behavioral outcomes, while health-related outcomes include any measure of biomedical or public health relevance.

5.1 Trial Registration Requirements

• All interventional trials must be registered prior to the enrollment of the first participant.
• Registration must occur in a primary register recognized by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP), ClinicalTrials.gov, or any other publicly accessible database that meets the minimum 24-item WHO trial registration dataset.
• The trial registration number must be included in both the abstract and the methods section of the manuscript.

Manuscripts reporting retrospectively registered trials or trials registered in databases that do not meet international transparency standards will not be considered for publication. Authors who are uncertain about registration requirements are advised to consult the ICMJE FAQs for further clarification.