Editorial team of the journals of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Bosnia & Herzegovina endorses the Sarajevo Declaration on Integrity and Visibility of Scholarly Publications aimed at improving the ethical standards, quality and implications of published articles (http://www.cmj.hr/2016/57/6/28051276.htm)
TECHNICAL INSTRUCTIONS
Submissions should include:
EDITING AND PUBLISHING FEE
All manuscripts submitted to Materia Socio Medica journal are assumed to be submitted under the Gold Open Access publishing model. The manuscripts pass in-house and external peer review.
When a manuscript is accepted for publication the corresponding author is contacted with an invoice for payment of flat 500 Euro publishing fee. The editing and publishing fees are required for substantive editing, scientific facts and references validation, copy editing, and publishing online and in print. No additional fees, other than stated above, are required. The Journal accepts donations from sponsors to create a sum for payment reductions or waivers for authors unable to cover editing and publishing fees (a justification of the inability to pay should be provided). Published papers are posted on the Journal website for free downloads by readers.
Any reproduction is possible with a permission of the authors who retain copyrights under the following license agreement: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Issues are published quarterly: in March, June, September, and December. In case when Editorial Board received enough papers during one year, it is possible to print additional issue as special issue or supplement.
AUTHORSHIP
Authorship credit should be based on the ICMJE criteria (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html):
Authors should meet all four criteria.
When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. The individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship/contributorship defined above, and editors will ask these individuals to complete author contributions and conflict-of-interest disclosure forms (http://www.icmje.org/conflicts-of-interest/). When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and identify all individual authors as well as the group name. The NLM indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript, it also lists the names of collaborators if they are listed in Acknowledgments.
Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.
Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.
Increasingly, authorship of multicenter trials is attributed to a group. All members of the group who are named as authors should fully meet the above criteria for authorship/contributorship.
The group should jointly make decisions about contributors/authors before submitting the manuscript for publication. The corresponding author/guarantor should be prepared to explain the presence and other of these individuals. It is not the role of editors to make authorship/contributorship decisions or to arbitrate conflicts to authorship.
Public trust in the peer review process and the credibility of published articles depend in part on how well conflict of interest is handled during writing, peer review, and editorial decision making.
After initial review from Editorial Board, article will be sent to double-blind peer review (reviewer will be scientist with PhD title from field that is related to article or professional worker that has more then 20 years of experience in that field without obtained PhD title) with, at least, 10 published papers in indexed journals as the first author.
After two reviews, the temporary decision will be sent to corresponding author as request for confirmation to continue of editing process by the Editor.
Conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author's institution), reviewer, or editor has financial or personal relationships that inappropriately influence (bias) his or her actions (such relationships are also known as dual commitments, competing interests, or competing loyalties). These relationships vary from those with negligible potential to those with great potential to influence judgment, and not all relationships represent true conflict of interest. The potential for conflict of interest can exist whether or not an individual believes that the relationship affects his or her scientific judgment. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion. (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ("Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals") -- February 2006)
Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should identify Individuals who provide writing assistance and disclose the funding source for this assistance.
Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note.
The requirement for informed consent should be included in the journal's instructions for authors. When informed consent has been obtained it should be indicated in the published article. (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ("Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals") -- February 2006)
When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach, and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should be asked to indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed. (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ("Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals") -- February 2006)
CONTRIBUTORS LISTED IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in a acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chairperson who provided only general support. Authors should declare whether they had assistance with steady design, data collection, data analysis, or manuscript preparation. If such assistance was available, the authors should disclose the identity of the individuals who provided this assistance and the entity that supported in the published article. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.
Groups of persons who have contributed materially to the paper but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be listed under such headings as “clinical investing” or “participating investigators,” and their function or contributions should be described—for example, “served as scientific advisors.” “Critically reviewed the study proposal.” “Collected data.” or “provided and for study patients.” Because readers may infer their endorsement of the data and conclusions, these persons must give permission to be acknowledged.
Please note: the Authorship and “Contributors Listed in Acknowledgements” sections are reprinted from the ICMJE Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. The ICMJE has not endorsed nor approved the contents of this reprint. The official version of the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals is located at www.ICMJE.org. Users should cite this official version when citing the document.
RELATED AUTHORS
Where authors of a paper are family members or relatives this should be explicitly disclosed at the time of submission. Please provide details of the relationship between such authors.
FIGURES AND TABLES
All graphical materials should be original. If graphics are reproduced from other media, relevant permission should be obtained from the copyrights holder. Tables should supplement but not replicate the text. Numbering in order of their citation in the text is a must. Start each table on a separate page. Provide a short descriptive title at the top of each table; rather than simply repeating the labels on columns and rows of the table, the title should reveal the point of grouping certain data in the table. Statistical and other details should be provided as footnotes rather than appearing in the title. Never repeat the same material in figures and tables; when either is equally clear, a figure is preferable. Do not include any class of information in tables that is not discussed in the text of the manuscript.
At the submission and review stages, embedded image files are acceptable for tables. Final versions of accepted manuscripts must have “true” tables in an editable format, created by using the “Insert Table” function, rather than using tabs or spaces. For example, in Microsoft Word you should select “Table, “Insert”, “Table”, then specify the number of rows and columns and fill in the individual cells.
Number figures in the order in which they are discussed in the text. Group the figure legends in numerical order on one or more pages, separate from the figures. The figure title should be given as the first two words of the legend. All tables and figures should be referenced in the main article text in result’s section, for example like “(Table 1)” or “(Figure 1)”.
SUPPLEMENTARY DATA
Any supplementary data should be kept to 6 typeset pages or 2,400 words. If you have any more than this you should provide a link to the supplementary data on an external website, your institutes’s website for example. We welcome video files either as supplementary data or as part of the actual manuscript to show operations, procedures, etc.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
RESEARCH REPORTING GUIDELINES
Prior to manuscript submission authors should consult relevant guidelines developed by a team of experts from the EQUATOR network, which are available at http://www.equator-network.org/. Authors who wish to submit case reports are advised to follow the latest guidance available at http://www.care.statetment.org/. Animal research studies should comply with standards outlined in the ARRIVE guidelines (http://www.nc3rs.org.uk/downloaddoc.asp?id=2093&page=1357&skin=0).
MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION
All manuscripts should be submitted online.
By doing so, authors agree to the terms and conditions of ethical submission. Simultaneous submission of a manuscript, considered for publication elsewhere, is absolutely unacceptable. Requests for secondary publication of our journal articles in other media should be forwarded to the publisher.
If any suspicion of data falsification, fabrication, manipulation, plagiarism, or other forms of misconduct in submitted or published articles is raised, our editors will act in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines (http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines), which may result in retractions and banning responsible authors from publication in our journals.
PRE-SUBMISSIONS
Authors are welcome to send an abstract or draft manuscript to obtain a view from the Editor about the suitability of their paper. Our Editors will do a quick review (not peer review) of your paper and advise if they believe it is appropriate for submission to their journal. This will be based on subject matter vs the aims and scope of the journal. It will not be a full review of your manuscript.
REFERENCE STYLE
Journal follows the MEDLINE/PubMed or Vancouver styles which are based on the style developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors in 1978 in Vancouver. Author during the preparation for the writing of specific article encounters with different types of secondary data. For example, the publication may be written by one, by several authors, and sometimes the authors are not listed but only the organization that published work. With that in mind, when citing sources, to the publication is variously referred to in the text. During the writing operation, may refer to different sources. In this guidelines article lists various examples of proper citation is most commonly used when writing a scientific and professional publications.
Citing references in the text of scientific papers, reviews and case reports
(that is recommended by SCOPEMED - www.scopemed.org):
Masic I, Milinovic K. On-line Biomedical Databases–the Best Source for Quick Search of the Scientific Information in the Biomedicine. Acta Inform Med. 2012; [cited January 25, 2013]; 20(2): 72-84.doi:10.5455/aim.2012.20.72-84
If we want to quote this article in article that we publish in an indexed journal that is covered by DBMS ScopeMed there are several recognized ways of quoting the text.
First manner of citation is Pubmed Style:
Example:
Masic I, Milinovic K. On-line Biomedical Databases–the Best Source for Quick Search of the Scientific Information in the Biomedicine. Acta Inform Med. 2012; 20(2): 72-84. doi:10.5455/aim.2012.20.72-84
National Library of Medicine (NLM) recommends using standard ANSI/NISO Z39.29-2005 (R2010). Bibliographic References standard is the basic format for Pubmed/MEDLINE citation. The last item in the above quotation is the unique identification number in the PubMed database and status citations indexed in MEDLINE. NLM has changed a way of citation that first is cited the author and title of the work in November 2008.
Another way is quoting WEB Style:
Web Style
Masic I, Milinovic K. On-line Biomedical Databases–the Best Source for Quick Search of the Scientific Information in the Biomedicine. www.scopemed.org/?mno=20169 [Access: January 25, 2013]. doi:10.5455/aim.2012.20.72-84
This method of citation is different from others in that after the basic information about the author and the work includes a web address. Commonly used at online portals, web sites, etc.
Third way of citation: AMA (American Medical Association) Style:
Masic I, Milinovic K. On-line Biomedical Databases–the Best Source for Quick Search of the Scientific Information in the Biomedicine. Acta Inform Med. 2012; 20(2): 72-84. doi:10.5455/aim.2012.20.72-84
It is recommended to use the full names of the first six authors and co-authors if there are more than 6, then we should write the first three and add et al.
The most commonly is recommended to use Vancouver/ICMJE Style:
Vancouver/ICMJE Style
Masic I, Milinovic K. On-line Biomedical Databases–the Best Source for Quick Search of the Scientific Information in the Biomedicine. Acta Inform Med. (2012), [cited January 27, 2013]; 20(2): 72-84.doi:10.5455/aim.2012.20.72-84
Citing references in biomedical scientific publications
Basic bibliographic elements are: author/s, title, journal title, numerical data on the journal, city, publisher and year of publication. Data on the quoted unit (references), the paper appears mandatory twice. For the first time in the text and the second time in a list of references. Reference in the text by Arabic numerals starting with 1 and a list of references entered in the order they appear in the text. Certain types of data separated with the original punctuation symbols that are standard profiled design references highlighted in red. From this structure we use bibliographic elements that appear in described publication, and all the others are omitted. When omitting an element of bibliographic description do not use punctuation symbol that precedes it. For example, if the publication has no subtitle we will not use the semicolon character that preceded the subtitle of the work, but after the title place the point that marks the end of each group of data.
Basic structure of the reference
As a space character is used as an underscore (_).
Printed an article from a journal
First author,_Second author,_… Sixth author_et_al._Title:_Subtitle._journal name._year;volume(issue or number_Pt_number)_Suppl _number:pages from—to.
Example 1
Masic I. Plagiarism in Scientific Publishing. Acta Inform Med. 2012 Dec; [cited May 17, 2013]; 20(4): 208-213.doi:10.5455/aim.2012.20.208-213.
More than six authors:
Example 2
Stipetić J, Čelebić A, Baučić I, Lazić B, Komar D, Bratolić V, et al. Analysis of occlusal contacts in different types of prosthodontics appliance: Eichner classification: presence RCP-ICP slide and the type of occlusion. CollAntropol. 2001; 25: 311-6.
Printed book
First author,_Second author,_… Sixth author_et_al._Booktitle:_Subtitle. _volume._City:_Firstpublisher,_Secondpublisher;_year.
Example 3.
Rang HP, Dale MM, Ritter JM, Moore PK. Pharmacology. 5th ed. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone; 2001.
Electronic materials–Compact Disc
Authors/editors._Articletitle:_Articlesubtitle._volume._[CD-ROM]._City: _Publisher;_year.
Example 4
Ash MM, Nelson SJ.Wheeler’s dental anatomy, physiology and occlusion [CD-ROM]. 8th ed. Philadelphia: Saunders; 2003.
Electronic materials–article
Authors._Articletitle:_Articlesubtitle._journal name_[serial on the Internet]._year_motnh_ [cited_year_month_day];volume(issue):[about x p.]._Available from:_webadress.
Example 5.
Masic I, Milinovic K. On-line Biomedical Databases–the Best Source for Quick Search of the Scientific Information in the Biomedicine. www.scopemed.org/?mno=20169 [Access: January 25, 2013]. doi:10.5455/aim.2012.20.72-84
Electronic materials–book
Authors/editors._Articletitle:_Articlesubtitle._volume_[monograph on the Internet]._City:_publisher;_year_[cited_year_month_day]. _ Available from:_web address
Example 6.
Lukač J. Kliničkaimunologija: nastavnopomagalozastudenteStomatološkogfakultetaSveučulišta u Zagrebu [monograph on the Internet]. Zagreb: Stomatološkifakultet; 2004 [cited 2005 Jun 20]. Available from: http://www.sfzg.hr/files/user/isamija/Klinicka_imunologija_skripta.doc
Citing books, monographs, textbooks, dissertations
BACK MATTER
After the last chapter, the back matter of the book can contain an appendix, a glossary, and/or an index. Do not include a reference list containing the cited literature in the back matter, as references are then not linked to citations in the chapters. Instead, include reference lists at the end of each chapter. A list of further reading may be included in the back matter.
APPENDIX An appendix cannot include a reference list. Include important original content within a chapter or a chapter appendix, not in the book appendix.
INDEX (IF APPLICABLE)
If an index is desired, please submit the index entries with the manuscript. Use the indexing function in Word or the index command in LaTeX to identify the index term as you write your text and indicate, on average, one or two index entry terms per manuscript page to be included in the index. Information should be listed under the term that most readers will probably look at first. Use cross-references to list variations or written-out versions and abbreviations/acronyms. If you provide a list with index terms, the index, with page numbers, will be generated by our production partner.
PROOFS
All of our journals are members of and subscribe to the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Public trust in the peer review process and the credibility of published articles depend in part on how well conflict of interest is handled during writing, peer review, and editorial decision making. Conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author's institution), reviewer, or editor has financial or personal relationships that inappropriately influence (bias) his or her actions (such relationships are also known as dual commitments, competing interests, or competing loyalties). These relationships vary from those with negligible potential to those with great potential to influence judgment, and not all relationships represent true conflict of interest. The potential for conflict of interest can exist whether or not an individual believes that the relationship affects his or her scientific judgment. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion.
- International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ("Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals") -- February 2006
Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should identify Individuals who provide writing assistance and disclose the funding source for this assistance.
Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note.
The requirement for informed consent should be included in the journal's instructions for authors. When informed consent has been obtained it should be indicated in the published article.
- International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ("Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals") -- February 2006
When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach, and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should be asked to indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.
- International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ("Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals") -- February 2006
Date of revision: January 8, 2019
