Editorial Policies

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

The International Journal of Paediatric Orthopaedics follows the COPE (Committee for Publication Ethics) Guidelines and decisions about duplicate publication, plagiarism, and article retraction are taken as per COPE Flowcharts. [Click Here to Download COPE Flowcharts]. All Authors need to report that their manuscript is an original publication and should sign the contributors’ form and conflict of interest form for each publication.

The International Journal of Paediatric Orthopaedics has the following salient points on Ethics and Malpractice

  1. Publication and authorship
  •  A list of funding agencies, financial support is to be disclosed.
  •  No plagiarism, no fraudulent data.
  •  Forbidden to publish same research in more than one journal.
  1. Author’s responsibilities
  • All authors are obliged to participate in the peer-review process.
  • All authors have to significantly contribute to the research.
  • A statement that all data in the article are real and authentic is to be given by all authors.
  • All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
  1. Peer review/responsibility for the reviewers 
  • Judgments should be objective.
  • Reviewers should have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors, and/or the research funders.
  • Reviewers should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited.
  • Reviewed articles should be treated confidentially.

      More details on Peer Review can be found HERE

  1. Editorial responsibilities
  • e.g. editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.
  • Editors have no conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept.
  • Only accept a paper when reasonably certain.
  • When errors are found, promote the publication of correction or retraction.
  • Preserve anonymity of reviewers.
  1. Publishing ethics issues
  • Monitoring/safeguarding publishing ethics by the editorial board.
  • Guidelines for retracting articles are as per the COPE guidelines.
  • Maintain the integrity of the academic record.
  • Journal is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
  • No plagiarism, no fraudulent data.

International Journal of Paediatric Orthopaedics (IJPO) follows the Editorial responsibilities as noted by COPE        guidelines: Click Here

The Editorial Process

  • The manuscript will be reviewed for possible publication with the understanding that they are being submitted to one journal at a time and has not been published, simultaneously submitted, or already accepted for publication elsewhere. Violation may lead to serious action against authors as per COPE guidelines
  • The Editorial Board will review all submitted manuscripts initially.
  • Manuscripts that seem to lack scientific message or content are rejected at first instance. Journal will not return unaccepted manuscripts.
  • Manuscripts that are not formatted as per journal guidelines will be sent for correct formatting before the review process.
  • The manuscript that gets approval from the editorial board and is formatted as per guidelines, will be sent for peer review by at least two expert reviewers [This number may exceed in cases where we do not get a definitive answer by two reviews]. The review process is blinded for the author, Institution, or place of origin of the manuscript. The journal wishes to publish the names of all our reviewers, however, the reviewer’s names will be kept blinded in terms of specific manuscripts.
  • The editorial team takes a final decision based on the comments received from the reviewers and also from the section editors
  • The contributors are usually informed about the reviewers’ comments and acceptance/rejection within a period of 6-8 weeks. This period may get extended in cases where more than two opinions are needed.
  • Articles accepted would be copy-edited for grammar, punctuation, print style, and format. All articles will also be rewritten by the Editorial team and a final copy will be sent to authors for approval.
  • Page proofs will be sent to the corresponding author, which has to be returned within 4 days.

Ethics
When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (available at http://www.wma.net/e/policy/17-c_e.html).
Do not use patients’ names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material.
When reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether the institution’s or a national research council’s guide for or any national law on the care and use of laboratory animals were followed.
All human and animal studies should be accompanied by a certificate of Ethics clearance, issued by an appropriate Institutional Review Board/Ethics Committee/ Departmental Board of Study or an equivalent authority of competence.

Scientific Misconduct
If plagiarism is detected after publication, the Journal will investigate the same, and if established, the author’s institution and funding bodies would be notified, and the article will be retracted. To report plagiarism, please contact the Journal office, preferably through email for better documentation of correspondence.
For duplicate publication, fabricated data, undisclosed conflict of interest, plagiarism, and/or other issues of publication and scientific misconduct, Trauma International follows the guidance produced by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).
IJPO endeavors to avoid all possible misconduct. All manuscripts are checked for plagiarism using iThenticate. If the Editor or a reviewer is concerned that some aspect of a submitted article may constitute misconduct in research, publication, or professional behavior, the Journal communicates the same to the author(s) and seeks clarification. However, if the concerns are not satisfactorily resolved by discussion with the author(s), the Journal may report the same to appropriate authorities such as their institutions and, for duplicate publication, the journal in which the previous publication had appeared.
The Journal also encourages its readers to report any published article in which they suspect misconduct through e-mail or letter. The anonymity of the complainant would be maintained at all times.

Protection of Patients’ Rights to Privacy
Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent/guardian, wherever applicable) provides informed consent for publication. Authors should remove patients’ names from figures unless they have obtained informed consent from the patients. The journal abides by the ICMJE guidelines:

1. Authors, and not the Journal or its Publisher, need to obtain the patient consent form before submitting their work for publication consideration to Trauma International. Authors should ensure that this patient consent form(s) are properly archived. The consent forms should not be uploaded with the cover letter or sent through email to the Editorial or Publisher offices.
2. If the manuscript contains patient images that preclude anonymity or a description that has an obvious indication of the identity of the patient, a statement about obtaining informed patient consent should be indicated in the manuscript.
3. To protect the patient’s identity, the recognizable facial features not related to the study should be digitally blurred
4. Written informed consent is the preferred method for obtaining consent. If verbal consent is obtained, the authors must ensure that the verbal consent is recorded in the medical case record of the patient and duly signed by witnesses.

Authorship Criteria

  • Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions.
  • To conception and design or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data.
  • Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
  • Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship.
  • General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship.
  • The order of naming the contributors should be based on the relative contribution of the contributor. Once submitted the order cannot be changed without the written consent of all the contributors.
  • For an original article the number of contributors should not exceed six; for case reports, the letter to the Editor, and review articles, the number of contributors should not exceed four.
  • A justification should be included if the number of contributors exceeds these limits.
  • Only those who have done substantial work in a particular field can write a review article. A short summary of the work done in the field of review should accompany the manuscript. 

Online Submission of the Manuscripts
The manuscript is to be submitted only online using submission software “Scripture” [Click Here]

New authors will have to register as “Author”, which is a simple two-step procedure.

Sending a revised manuscript
The revised version of the manuscript should be submitted online in a manner similar to that used for the submission of the manuscript for the first time. However, there is no need to submit the “First Page” or “Covering Letter” file while submitting a revised version. When submitting a revised manuscript, contributors are requested to include, the ‘referees’ remarks along with point-to-point clarification at the beginning of the revised file itself. In addition, they are expected to mark the changes as underlined or colored text in the article.

Open Access Policy
The entire contents of the International Journal of Paediatric Orthopaedics are protected under India and international copyrights. However, the Journal grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to use, copy, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable non-commercial purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship and ownership of the rights. The journal also grants the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal non-commercial use under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International Public License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Copyrights
The entire contents of the International Journal of Paediatric Orthopaedics are protected under India and international copyrights. However, the Journal grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy use distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable non-commercial purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship and ownership of the rights. The journal also grants the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal non-commercial use under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International Public License.

Acceptance or rejection
Manuscripts are judged on the interest and importance of the topic, intellectual and scientific strength, clarity of presentation, and relevance to International Journal of Paediatric Orthopaedics readers.

Download the Copyright form here

Policy Against Plagiarism
The Journal follows strict anti-plagiarism policy and defines plagiarism as the duplicate publication of the author’s own work, in whole or in part without proper citation, or mispresenting other’s ideas, words, and other creative expressions as one’s own. All manuscripts submitted to the journal undergo plagiarism check with the commercially available software iThenticate. Only in cases of minor duplication or similarity with previously published work, the authors may be provided with an opportunity to rectify the same; in all other cases, the manuscript is desk rejected along with the plagiarism report (please also see the Scientific Misconduct section for additional details).

Conflict-of-interest statement
All authors are expected to disclose any commercial affiliations as well as consultancies, stock ownership, or patent-licensing arrangements that could be considered to pose a conflict of interest regarding the submitted article. A conflict-of-interest statement will be forwarded to the corresponding author for signature upon acceptance of the manuscript. The signature of all authors is required. No article will be published until the return of the completed form to the journal office.

Download Conflict of Interest form

 

Conflict of Interest forms are according to Guidelines by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and Each Authors details have to fill separately and submitted with the manuscript. Plagiarism is not permitted and Journal will check every article for plagiarism using ‘iThenticate’ and google search.

Acknowledgments

  • As an appendix to the text, one or more statements should specify.
  • Contributions that need acknowledging but do not justify authorship, such as general support by a departmental chair.
  • Acknowledgments of technical help.
  • Acknowledgments of financial and material support, which should specify the nature of the support.
  • This should be included on the title page of the manuscript.

Statistics

  • Statistical methods should be described in detail.
  • The statement “no significant difference was found between two groups” cannot be made unless a power study was done and the value of alpha or beta is reported. Use of the word significant requires reporting of a p-value.
  • Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are required whenever the results of survivorship analysis are given in the text or graphs.
  • Use of the word correlation requires reporting of the correlation coefficient.

For any queries contact at editor.ijpo@gmail.com