Editorial Policies

All scholarly journals published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences work based on the following policies.*

Overview

The Publishing Group of Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences adheres to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. The journals published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences endorse the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

 

Submitting a manuscript to a journal published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences implies that all contributors listed as authors have read and agreed to the content of the submitted work and that the submission observes the policies of the journal.

Table of contents

Ethics and consent

Ethics approval

The journals published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and adhere to its Best Practice Guidelines.

Every submitted manuscript must include a statement to verify that the study has received ethics approval (or a statement that ethics approval has not been required and the reason). The name of the ethics committee(s) or institutional review board(s), the reference number/ID of the approval(s), and a statement that informed consent has been obtained from the participants before participating should be provided. Even when a study has been approved by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, the author(s) are required to provide more detailed information about the ethics of the work in the case of the Journal request. Also, research involving human subjects, human specimens, or human data must have been performed by the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. Submissions may be declined if the journals’ editors conclude that the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. The editors have also the right to contact the institutions’ ethics committee for further information in certain cases.

Allegations of publication misconduct, both before and after publication will be carefully inspected and we reserve the right to contact authors' institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if necessary. In the case of conclusive evidence of misconduct, proper steps will be taken to correct the scientific record, which may include supplying a correction or retraction.

It is assumed that authors are fully aware of publication ethics, specifically about authorship, dual submission, plagiarism, figure manipulation, competing interests, and compliance with standards of research ethics. Suspected cases of misconduct will be subject to COPE standards and practices and advice from the COPE forum will be ascertained.

Retrospective ethics approval

If a study has not been granted ethics committee approval before the implementation, retrospective ethics approval usually cannot be obtained and it may not be possible to consider the submission for peer review. The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the discretion of the journal’s editors.

Patient consent and confidentiality

Reporting any personal medical information about an identifiable living individual in the journals published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences requires the patient’s explicit consent prior to the publication. Therefore, all studied patients are required to sign an informed consent form after reading the studies’ information sheet.

If consent cannot be obtained because the patient cannot be traced in a study, then publication will be possible only with sufficient anonymization of the information which means that neither the person nor anyone else could identify the individual with certainty.

In the case of a patient’s death, permission should be obtained from a relative (as a matter of courtesy and medical ethics). If the relatives are not contactable, it is on journals to evaluate the worthwhileness of the case, the likelihood of identification, and the likelihood of offense in the decision to publish a submitted paper.

Images—such as x-rays, laparoscopic images, ultrasound images, pathology slides, or images of undistinctive parts of the body—may be used without consent just if they are anonymized by the removal of any identifying marks and any accompanied text that could reveal the patient’s identity.

Research involving animals

Experimental research on vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must be according to the institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The basic principles of conducting research on animals have been outlined in Basel Declaration and the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) has also published ethical guidelines.

For experimental studies involving client-owned animals, documentation of informed consent from the client or owner and adherence to a high standard (best practice) of veterinary care are required.

 

Trial registration

According to the ICMJE, a clinical trial is defined as “any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect, relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome.”In agreement with the ICMJE’s recommendations, all journals published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences will only accept reports of clinical trials that have been registered prospectively before recruitment of any participant and require registration of all trials in a public registry of trials approved by the ICMJE (any registry that is a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en/index.html).

The trial registration number and the date of registration should be included in the last line of the abstract.

Standards of reporting

Authors are advised to use the relevant research reporting guidelines for the study type provided by the EQUATOR Network when preparing their manuscript. Authors should adhere to these guidelines when drafting their manuscript, and peer reviewers will be asked to refer to these checklists in their evaluations. This will ensure that the authors have provided enough information for editors, peer reviewers, and readers to understand how the research was performed and judge the reported results' reliability.

The key reporting guidelines are:

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs): CONSORT guidelines

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses: PRISMA guidelines and MOOSE guidelines

Observational studies in epidemiology: STROBE guidelines

Diagnostic accuracy studies: STARD guidelines

Quality improvement studies: SQUIRE guidelines

Qualitative research: SRQR or COREQ

Economic evaluations: CHEERS

Statistical methods

The authors should include complete information about the applied statistical methods and measures in the research, including justification of the appropriateness of the applied statistical test (see the SAMPL guidelines for more information). Not only will the reviewers be asked to check the statistical methods, but the manuscript may even be sent for statistical review by specialists if considered necessary. The editors may also consult a specialist in the field of methodology.

 

Competing interests

Anything that influences or could be considered as influencing the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of a submitted article, either financial or non-financial, is considered a competing interest and the corresponding author is required to declare on behalf of other authors all competing interests on submission and during the publication process. Even when there is no competing interest, it should be clearly stated. An article with undisclosed competing interests found after publication will be subject to COPE guidelines and public notification.

Editors and reviewers are also required to declare any competing interests and if a competing interest exists, they will be excluded from the peer review process.

The policy of Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences is that none of the journals’ editors should have any financial relationship with any biomedical company.

Financial competing interests

Financial competing interests include (but are not limited to):

  • Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of the manuscript, either now or in the future.
  • Holding stocks or shares in an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of the manuscript, either now or in the future.
  • Holding, or currently applying for patents relating to the content of the manuscript.
  • Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding or salary from an organization that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript.

 Non-financial competing interests

 Non-financial competing interests include (but are not limited to) political, personal,         ideological, academic, and intellectual competing interests.

      Commercial organizations

 

Authors who work in commercial organizations, like pharmaceutical companies, that sponsor clinical trials are required to declare the competing interest and they should also follow  Good Publication Practice guidelines for pharmaceutical companies (GPP2).

 

Authorship

An 'author' is generally considered to be someone who has according to ICMJE, should meet the following criteria:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data.

2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.

3. Final approval of the version published.

4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

These criteria do not include other activities such as data gathering, technical and writing assistance and supervision of the research team. Participants involved in these activities should be mentioned in the “Acknowledgment” part.

Acknowledgments

Everyone who does not have the criteria of authorship but helped in the process of study and preparing the manuscript should be named in the “Acknowledgement” section after obtaining his/her permission to be mentioned for the stated contribution towards the submitted material.

Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. All sources of grants and other support for the project or study, including funds received from contributors, institutions, and commercial sources must be reported. Consultancies and funds paid directly to investigators must also be listed. The involvement of scientific (medical) writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be acknowledged, along with their source of funding, as described in the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) guidelines.

Author information

Complete and correct author information must be provided not only for the purpose of being recognizable by the scientific community but also for retrieving records in databases and bibliographic indexes. It is the policy of the journals published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences to publish author information, including their names and affiliations in the same format provided by the corresponding author upon submission. Moreover, in order to avoid any error including misspelling of authors’ names or inconsistency with their previous publications, all authors are required to review and approve an automatically-generated presentation of author information, as in a published record, based on their provided information.

Authorship changes

Any change in authorship (i.e. order, addition, and deletion of authors) after initial submission must be clarified to the editor and it is the corresponding author’s responsibility to ensure that all authors confirm their agreement with the proposed changes In line with COPE guidelines, Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences requires written confirmation from all authors that they agree with any proposed changes in authorship of submission(s) or published item(s). This confirmation must be via direct email from each author. If there is disagreement amongst the authors concerning authorship and a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached, the authors must contact their institution(s) for a resolution. It is not the journal editor’s responsibility to resolve authorship disputes. A change in authorship of a published article can only be amended via the publication of an Erratum.

 

Unique identifiers

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences encourages the authors and also its reviewers to use ORCID.  The editorial team members of the journals also include their unique identifiers in their profiles.

 

Citations

Research articles and non-research articles (e.g. Opinion, Review, and Commentary articles) must cite appropriate and relevant literature in support of the claims made. Excessive and inappropriate self-citation or coordinated efforts among several authors to collectively self-cite is strongly discouraged.

Authors should consider the following guidelines when preparing their manuscript:

Appropriate sources should be cited for any statement in the manuscript that relies on external sources of information (i.e. not the authors' own new ideas or findings or general knowledge).

Authors should cite the original work and avoid indirect citations such as referring to a review article that cites an original work.

Authors should ensure that their citations are accurate and in support of the statement made in their manuscript and should not misrepresent another work by citing it if it does not support the point the authors wish to make).

Authors should not cite sources that they have not read.

Authors should not preferentially cite their own or their friends’, peers’, or institution’s publications.

Cited sources should not be limited to works belonging to solely one country.

Authors should not use an excessive number of citations to support one point.

It is more desirable to cite sources that have undergone peer review where possible.

Authors should not cite advertisements or advertorial material.

 

Duplicate publication

Any manuscript that is submitted to a journal published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences must be original and the manuscript or substantial parts of it, must not be under consideration by any other journal. In any case of potential overlap or duplication, the authors are required to be transparent and declare it on submission. Any overlapping publications should be cited. Any ‘in press’ or unpublished manuscript cited or relevant to the Editor’s and reviewers' assessment of the manuscript, should be made available upon the Editor’s request. Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences reserves the right to judge potentially overlapping or redundant publications on a case-by-case basis.

In general, the submitted manuscript should not already have been formally published in any journal or in any other citable form. As an exception to this rule, declared and justified cases upon submission such as publication in the form of a poster or conference presentation might be accepted.

The journals published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences use Ithenticate plagiarism detection technology and take seriously all cases of publication misconduct. Any suspected cases of covert duplicate manuscript submission will be subject to the COPE guidelines and the Editor has the right to contact the authors’ institution (refer to Misconduct policy for more information). Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences follows the policies of the ICMJE in relation to overlapping publications.

Summary clinical trial results in public registries

Posting of summary clinical trial results in public databases is generally not considered duplicate publication. Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences requires authors of manuscripts reporting clinical trials to have registered their trial in a suitably accessible registry (see our Trial registration policy for more information).

 

Text recycling

Replication of text from the authors’ previous publications is considered text recycling (also referred to as self-plagiarism) and in some cases is not accepted. Where overlap of text with authors’ own previous publications is necessary or unavoidable, duplication must always be reported transparently and be properly attributed and meet copyright requirements. If a submission contains text that has been published elsewhere, authors should declare it in the submission cover letter.

 

Peer review

All research articles, and most other article types, submitted to the journals of Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences undergo a thorough peer review process. This usually involves review by two independent peer reviewers but due to the slight differences in journals’ policies, for an individual journal’s peer review policy, please see the journal website.

Peer review policy

The journal’s Editor is responsible for deciding whether a submitted manuscript is suitable for peer review and if an editor is on the author list or has any other competing interest regarding a specific submission, another member of the editorial board will be assigned to take this responsibility. Submissions felt to be suitable for consideration will be sent for peer review by appropriate independent experts. Editors will make a decision based on the reviewers’ reports and these reports along with the editorial decision on the submitted manuscript are sent to the corresponding author. Authors should note that even in light of one positive report, the manuscript might be rejected due to the concerns raised by another reviewer.

All journals published by Rafsanjan University of Medical Sciences follow a closed double-blind peer review process. The authors and the reviewers will be treated anonymously.