Ethical Guidelines

 Ethical Issues is obligatory section in all types of articles. If there is no ethical issue to be considered, please declare it as “not applicable” or “None to be declared”. Every experimental or clinical study may raise controversial ethical issues (e.g., Institutional Ethical Approval for working with animal or human subjects). Thus, JEPT expects all authors, reviewers and editors to consider COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) and Equator Network’s reporting guidelines in medical ethics plus scientific writing. If any, authors should state related declaration(s), unless otherwise the following sentence should be given “None to be declared”. Ethical considerations must be addressed in the main body. 1- Please state that informed consent was obtained from all human adult participants and from the parents or legal guardians of minors. Include the name of the appropriate institutional review board that approved the project. 2- Indicate in the text that the maintenance and care of experimental animals complies with National Institutes of Health guidelines for the humane use of laboratory animals, or those of your Institute or agency.

Please take a look at the following guidelines provided by COPE for editors and reviewers that may be helpful for authors, too:

• Flowcharts shows how we behave with unethical papers
• Redundant (duplicate) publication in submitted manuscript and published article
• Suspected plagiarism in submitted manuscript and published article
• Suspected fabricated data in submitted manuscript and published article and See more

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. If a conclusive evidence of misconduct is noticed, proper steps will be taken to correct the scientific record, which may include supplying a correction or retraction.

Authors are assumed that they are aware of publication ethics, specifically with regard to authorship, dual submission, plagiarism, figure manipulation, competing interests and compliance with standards of research ethics. In cases of suspected misconduct, COPE standards and practices will be followed and advice from the COPE forum will be ascertained.

Funding/ Support and Role of Sponsor

All contributing authors will be required to complete and disclose all funding or financial support received in the Authorship Form (see Sample Authorship Form). All funding, material or financial support for the work should be clearly and completely described in the Acknowledgements Section of the manuscript. Role of funding organisation or sponsor in each of the following stages of the research should be clearly defined: “design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis and interpretation of data; preparation, editing or approval of the work; and confirm to publish the manuscript”.

Duplicate/ Previous Publication or Submission

Manuscripts are assumed not to be published previously in print or electronic version and are not under consideration by another publication. Copies of related or possibly duplicated materials (including those containing significantly similar content or using same data) that have been published previously or are under consideration for another publication must be provided at the time of online submission.
For more information on ethical issues, please read the following COPE’s guidelines that might be helpful for authors as well as editors:
Suspected redundant publication in a submitted manuscript (Link)
Suspected redundant publication in a published article (Link)
Suspected fabricated data in a submitted manuscript (Link)
Suspected fabricated data in a published article (Link)

Editorial Review and Publication

JEPT’s authors will be sent notifications of the manuscript’s receipt and editorial decisions by email. During the peer-reviewing process, authors can check the status of their manuscript via the Online Manuscript Submission System.
All submissions to the JEPT go through a double-blind peer-review process to ensure content quality. At the first stage, a technical editor checks format and style of manuscript to assure its compatibility with the JEPT’s guide for authors. If authors have not considered the guides, the manuscript will be sent back to authors for compatibility. The manuscript will be then assigned to section editors, based on the subject area and editor-in-chief decision, for a fast pre-review screening within 5 days. Section editors check the manuscript for content quality (with a focus on methodology, originality, and contribution to knowledge and practice) and use of English. The decision at this stage is fast reject, revise and re-submit, or assign to external reviewers for detailed evaluation process. Selection of external reviewers is based on their scientific background and experience, previous works, authors’ suggestion, and expertise. Every attempt is made at the JEPT to obtain at least 4 strong reviews on each manuscript (1 epidemiologist, I statistician and 2 subject expert). Editor-in-Chief receives the reviewers’ comments and sends them along with decision letter to corresponding author.
JEPT adheres to a double-blind peer-review process that is rapid, fair, and ensures the high quality of published articles. JEPT’s reviewers are required to declare their conflict of interests and maintain the confidentiality about the manuscripts they review.

• Reviewers' and authors' identities are kept confidential.
• The existence of a submitted manuscript is not revealed to anyone other than the reviewers and editorial staff.
• Reviewers are required to keep manuscripts and their information confidential.
• They should not use knowledge of the manuscript before its publication for their personal interests.
• The reviewers' comments should be constructive, honest, and polite.
• Reviewers should declare their potential conflicts of interest and decline review if one exists. Knowing the author(s) should not affect their comments and decision.

As JEPT is a rapid response journal, the review process takes between 2 to 3 months. JEPT decision letter determines the status of manuscript in five ways:

1. Acceptance: the manuscript could be published electronically. This process lasts between one to two weeks. Before electronic publication, corresponding author should verify a proof copy of the paper. JEPT supports the Advance Access initiative by which papers that have been copyedited and typeset but not yet paginated for inclusion in an issue of the journal are appeared online upon finishing with the review process. Advance accessed papers will be in a queue to be published in one of JEPT’s upcoming issues.

2. Minor Revision: authors will receive comments on their manuscript and will be asked to submit a revised copy (showing all changes they have made to the manuscript using Track and Change or highlighted colour) beside a response to reviewer file in which they need to respond to each and every comment of reviewer one by one (for each reviewer separately). Revisions should be submitted in 5 weeks after decision letter.

3. Major Revision: it means a chance to reorganize the manuscript to meet the required scientific criteria for another review process. Here also authors are asked to submit a revised copy (showing all changes they have made to the manuscript using Track and Change or highlighted colour) beside a response to reviewer file in which they need to respond to each and every comment of reviewer one by one (for each reviewer separately). Revisions should be submitted in 5 weeks after decision letter.
Revisions should be submitted in 7 weeks after decision letter. Otherwise, authors need to go through a resubmission process.

4. Rejection: in most cases, methodological and scientific concerns are the main origins of rejection. Causes of rejection will be sent to the authors to provide more chance for them for publication in other journals.

Editing

Accepted manuscripts will be edited according to the JEPT’s Guide for Authors (our journal provide English language service to non-English speaking authors too) and returned to the corresponding author for final approval. All contributing authors are responsible for all statements made in their manuscript during editing and production that are authorized by the corresponding author.

Corrections

Requests for publishing corrections should be sent to the editorial office. Corrections will be reviewed by editors and are published immediately and linked online to the original paper.

Conflicts of interest

 Authors must acknowledge and declare any sources of funding and potential conflicting interest, such as receiving funds or fees by, or holding stocks and shares in an organization that may profit or lose through publication of your paper. Declaring a competing interest will not lead to automatic rejection of the paper, but we would like to be made aware of it.

Pay charges

 There are no charges for publication in this Journal.

Copyright

 Open Access agreement

Upon submitting an article, authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an Open Access Creative Commons license.  Under the terms of this license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), authors retain ownership of the copyright of their articles. However, the license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article, so long as appropriate credit is given to the authors and the source of the work. The license ensures that the article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive..

Peer review process

 All manuscripts are considered to be confidential. They are blind peer reviewed by at least 2 anonymous reviewers selected by the Editorial Board. The corresponding author is notified as soon as possible of the editor decision to accept, reject, or require modifications.

Plagiarism

JEPT is committed to publish the original studies and timely reviews that have neither been published nor is under review elsewhere. JEPT is powered by CrossCheck™, iThenticate™ and all the submitted manuscripts are subjected to the CrossCheck. Taken all, all plagiarized materials will incur the “Plagiarism Sanctions”. Submitted manuscripts, which are found to be published or under review elsewhere, will be sustained and experience the “Duplicated Publication Sanctions”. Submitted Manuscripts, which are found to include either fabricated or falsified data including the manipulation of images, will confront with the “Data Fabrication/Falsification Sanctions”.

Misconduct

The Journal of Emergency Practice and Trauma will follow the COPE guidelines to deal with cases of potential publication misconduct.

Retrospective Ethics Approval

If a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing, 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 journals’ editors.

Patient Consent and Confidentiality

Any item submitted to the Journal of Emergency Practice and Trauma that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires patient’s explicit consent before it can be published. Consequently; 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 if the information can be sufficiently anonymized. Anonymization means that neither the person nor anyone else could identify the individual with certainty.

If the patient is dead the authors should seek permission from a relative (as a matter of courtesy and medical ethics). If the relatives are not contactable, the journal will balance the worthwhileness of the case, the likelihood of identification, and the likelihood of offence in 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 so long as they are anonymized by the removal of any identifying marks and are not accompanied by text that could reveal the patients’ identity.

Trial Registration

Based on the ICMJE recommendations 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.”

As a condition of consideration for publication, Trial articles published by The Journal of Emergency Practice and Trauma 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 submission abstract.