Policies and Ethics

ScienceQ Publishing Group

Policies and Ethics in Publishing

The publication of an article in a peer-reviewed journal is an essential building block in the development of a coherent and respected network of knowledge. It is a direct reflection of the quality of the work of the authors and the institutions that support them. Peer-reviewed articles support and embody the scientific method. It is therefore important to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior for all parties involved in the act of publishing: the author, the journal editor, the peer reviewer, and the publisher.

The work described in your article must have been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans external link http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/index.html

EU Directive 2010/63/EU for animal experiments external link http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/lab_animals/legislation_en.htm

Uniform Requirements for manuscripts submitted to Biomedical journals external link http://www.icmje.org . This must be stated at an appropriate point in the article.

  • Authorship of the paper: Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study.
  • Originality and plagiarism: The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.
  • Data access and retention: Authors may be asked to provide the raw data in connection with a paper for editorial review, and should be prepared to provide public access to such data.
  • Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication: An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication.
  • Acknowledgement of sources: Proper acknowledgment.
  • Disclosure and conflicts of interest: All submissions must include disclosure of all relationships that could be viewed as presenting a potential conflict of interest.
  • Fundamental errors in published works: When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper.
  • Reporting standards: Authors of reports of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance.
  • Hazards and human or animal subjects: Statements of compliance are required if the work involves chemicals, procedures or equipment that have any unusual hazards inherent in their use, or if it involves the use of animal or human subjects.
  • Use of patient images or case details: Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent, which should be documented in the paper.

All works published by ScienceQ Publishing Group are under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. This permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work provided the original work and source is appropriately cited.

Article Structuring Guidance

Manuscript document format

Please submit your paper in Word Document format (.docx, .doc, .rtf) complete with embedded figures and tables. The text of the manuscript should be in single-column format and excluding page numbers. Keep the layout of the text as simple as possible. Please do not include any line numbers or running headers or footers such as the manuscript title or corresponding author name. Please remove any “hidden edits” from your paper prior to submission by using track changes then accept changes. Most formatting codes will be removed and replaced on processing the article. In particular, do not use the wordprocessor’s options to justify text or to hyphenate words. However, do use bold face, italics, subscripts, superscripts etc. Do not embed “graphically designed” equations or tables, but prepare these using the wordprocessor’s facility. The electronic text should be prepared in a way very similar to that of conventional manuscripts. To avoid unnecessary errors you are strongly advised to use the “spell-check” and “grammar-check” functions of your wordprocessor.

FONT= “Times New Roman” Size= 10

Essential title page information

  • Title: Concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid abbreviations and formulae where possible.
  • Author names and affiliations: Where the family name may be ambiguous (e.g., a double name), please indicate this clearly. Present the authors’ affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the author’s name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name.
  • Corresponding author: Clearly indicate who will handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication. Ensure that telephone and fax numbers (with country and area code) are provided in addition to the e-mail address and the complete postal address. Contact details must be kept up to date by the corresponding author.
  • Present/permanent address: If an author has moved since the work described in the article was done, or was visiting at the time, a ‘Present address’ (or ‘Permanent address’) may be indicated as a footnote to that author’s name. The address at which the author actually did the work must be retained as the main, affiliation address.

Abstract
A concise and factual abstract is required. The abstract should state briefly the purpose of the research, the principal results and major conclusions. An abstract is often presented separately from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. For this reason, References should be avoided, but if essential, then cite the author(s) and year(s). Also, non-standard or uncommon abbreviations should be avoided, but if essential they must be defined at their first mention in the abstract itself.

Keywords
Immediately after the abstract, provide a maximum of 6 keywords, using American spelling and avoiding general and plural terms and multiple concepts (avoid, for example, ‘and’, ‘of’). Be sparing with abbreviations: only abbreviations firmly established in the field may be eligible. These keywords will be used for indexing purposes.

Introduction
State the objectives of the work and provide an adequate background, avoiding a detailed literature survey or a summary of the results.

Material and methods
Provide sufficient detail to allow the work to be reproduced. Methods already published should be indicated by a reference: only relevant modifications should be described.

Results
Results should be clear and concise.

Discussion
This should explore the significance of the results of the work, not repeat them. A combined Results and Discussion section is often appropriate. Avoid extensive citations and discussion of published literature.

Acknowledgements
Collate acknowledgements in a separate section at the end of the article before the references and do not, therefore, include them on the title page, as a footnote to the title or otherwise. List here those individuals who provided help during the research (e.g., providing language help, writing assistance or proof reading the article, etc.).

Color artwork
Please make sure that artwork files are embedded within the manuscript at the correct place.

Figure captions
Ensure that each illustration has a caption. Supply captions separately, not attached to the figure. A caption should comprise a brief title (not on the figure itself) and a description of the illustration. Keep text in the illustrations themselves to a minimum but explain all symbols and abbreviations used.

Tables
Number tables consecutively in accordance with their appearance in the text. Place footnotes to tables below the table body and indicate them with superscript lowercase letters. Avoid vertical rules. Be sparing in the use of tables and ensure that the data presented in tables do not duplicate results described elsewhere in the article.

References

Citation in text
Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). Any references cited in the abstract must be given in full. Unpublished results and personal communications are not recommended in the reference list, but may be mentioned in the text. If these references are included in the reference list they should follow the standard reference style of the journal and should include a substitution of the publication date with either ‘Unpublished results’ or ‘Personal communication’. Citation of a reference as ‘in press’ implies that the item has been accepted for publication.

Web references
As a minimum, the full URL should be given and the date when the reference was last accessed. Any further information, if known (DOI, author names, dates, reference to a source publication, etc.), should also be given. Web references can be listed separately (e.g., after the reference list) under a different heading if desired, or can be included in the reference list.

Example
‘….. as demonstrated [3,6]. Watson and crick [8] obtained a different result ….’

List
Number the references (numbers in square brackets) in the list in the order in which they appear in the text.

Reference to a journal publication
J. van der Geer, J.A.J. Hanraads, R.A. Lupton, The art of writing a scientific article, J. Sci. Commun. 163 (2010) 51–59.

Reference to a book
W. Strunk Jr., E.B. White, The Elements of Style, fourth ed., Longman, New York, 2000.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book
G.R. Mettam, L.B. Adams, How to prepare an electronic version of your article, in: B.S. Jones, R.Z. Smith (Eds.), Introduction to the Electronic Age, E-Publishing Inc., New York, 2009, pp. 281–304.

You must also list a minimum of 2 authors associated with a cited work before using “et al.” in each of your references.

Journal abbreviations source

Journal names should be abbreviated according to

Index Medicus journal abbreviations http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/lji.html

List of title word abbreviations http://www.issn.org/2-22661-LTWA-online.php

CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) http://www.cas.org/sent.html

Submission checklist

It is hoped that this list will be useful during the final checking of an article prior to sending it to the journal’s Editor for review. Please consult this Guide for Authors for further details of any item.

Ensure that the following items are present

  • Author designated as corresponding Author
  • E-mail address
  • Full postal address
  • Keywords
  • All figure captions
  • All tables (including title, description, footnotes)
  • Further considerations
  • Manuscript has been “spellchecked” and “grammar-checked”
  • References are in the correct format for this journal
  • All references mentioned in the Reference list are cited in the text, and vice versa
  • Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Web)
  • Post acceptance, please wait to make necessary minor corrections until the receipt of page proofs from our Production department. One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author
  • Please list your corrections quoting line number. If, for any reason, this is not possible, then mark the corrections and any other comments on a printout of your proof and scan the pages and e-mail. Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor. We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication: please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility. Note that publication may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.

Ethics in Publishing

The publication of an article in a peer-reviewed journal is an essential building block in the development of a coherent and respected network of knowledge. It is a direct reflection of the quality of the work of the authors and the institutions that support them. Peer-reviewed articles support and embody the scientific method. It is therefore important to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior for all parties involved in the act of publishing: the author, the journal editor, the peer reviewer, and the publisher.

Policies and Ethics

The work described in your article must have been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans external link http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/index.html

EU Directive 2010/63/EU for animal experiments external link http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/lab_animals/legislation_en.htm

Uniform Requirements for manuscripts submitted to Biomedical journals external link http://www.icmje.org . This must be stated at an appropriate point in the article.

All works published by ScienceQ Publishing Group are under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. This permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work provided the original work and source is appropriately cited.