About the Journal

Focus and Scope

Journal of Advances in Internal Medicine (JAIM) is a biannual, peer-reviewed, open-access, international medical journal ISSN 2091-1432 (Print) and 2091-1440 (Online). JAIM publishes the original research and critical reviews dealing with all disciplines of Internal Medicine. It is the official journal of the Society of Internal Medicine of Nepal (SIMON) and is published twice a year (January and July). Each issue of JAIM publishes Original Articles, Review Articles, Medical Images, Case Reports, Editorials, Letters to the Editor, Viewpoint and Invited articles. Authors do not have to pay for the submission, processing or publication of articles in JAIM. Manuscript can be submitted directly by email to umidshrestha@gmail.com

Any manuscripts or substantial parts of it, submitted to JAIM must not be under consideration by any other journal. In general, the manuscript should not have already been published in any journal or other citable form. JAIM is determined to maintain the standard and quality of the journal and its manuscript acceptance rate is 35%.

Categories: Clinical research, clinical trials, digestive diseases, endocrinology, immunology, infectious diseases, nephrology, neurology, oncology, blood disorders, cardiology, pulmonary medicine, rheumatic and immunologic diseases, gene therapy, human genetics, case report, medical image, review article

Audience: Specialist of medical disciplines, Internist, Medical Faculty Member, Fellow, Resident, Researcher

Peer Review Process

The journal follows a blind peer review process.

Submissions 
The journal accepts only online submission. The Editorial Office will send an e-mail to the corresponding author acknowledging receipt of a manuscript, whether new or a resubmission.

Review process
Each manuscript is assigned to an Editor who assesses whether it is appropriate and competitive for publication. Then it is sent to experts in the appropriate area for peer review. The Editor chooses two to three reviewers, who remain anonymous. Reviewers provide comments for the editor and for the authors. The peer-review process usually takes about 12 weeks and the time taken from submission to publication takes about 16 weeks.

Decisions
The single most important criterion for acceptance is the originality and relevance of the work. However, a decision to accept a manuscript is not based solely on the scientific validity of its content. Other factors affecting decisions include the extent and importance of new information in the paper compared with that in other papers being considered, the Journal's need to represent a wide range of topics, and the overall suitability for JAIM. Decisions on peer-reviewed papers are e-mailed to the authors.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Publication Ethics and Policies for Journal of Advances in Internal Medicine (JAIM)

The publication of a manuscript comes from respected network of knowledge. It reflects the quality work of the authors and the institutions that support them. Peer-reviewed articles support and embody the scientific method. This leads to the importance of ethical responsibility that follows on to any author, editor, reviewer and owner of the journal. Based on a number of industry organizations, notably the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), Consolidated Standards Of Reporting Trials (Consort) and Elsevier Publication a comprehensive policy on publication ethics is summarized here, which addresses all the major areas JAIM considers important. Policies are given in order of manuscript supervisions.

  1. Ethical consideration
  2. Patient consent
  3. Authorship criteria
  4. Corresponding author
  5. Disclosure and conflicts of interest
  6. Duties of authors
  7. Copyright transfer
  8. Duties of editors
  9. Editorial independence
  10. Duties of reviewers
  11. Plagiarism and possible misconduct

Ethical considerations

Ethics committee approval from respective health institution is obligatory for all manuscript submission. Following information should be presented. Manuscripts reporting data obtained from research conducted in human subjects must include a statement of assurance in the Methods section of the manuscript that

  1. Informed consent was obtained from each patient and
  2. The study protocol conforms to the ethical guidelines of the 1975 Declaration of Helsinki as reflected in a priori approval by the institution's human research committee. Ethics committee approval statement (IRC approval) is compulsory at the time of manuscript submission. JAIM does not have any policy for accepting/considering manuscripts reporting experiments using animals.

Patient consent

Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent, which should be documented in submitted manuscript. Patients’ right must be respected and hence, identifying information, including patients? Images, names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be included in videos, recordings, written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and you have obtained written informed consent for publication in print and electronic form from the patient (or parent, guardian or next of kin where applicable).

If such consent is made subject to any conditions, JAIM must be made aware of all such conditions. Written consents must be provided to JAIM on request.

Even where consent has been given, identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. 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.

If such consent has not been obtained, personal details of patients included in any part of the paper and in any supplementary materials (including all illustrations and videos) must be removed before submission.

Authorship criteria

An “author” generally considered as someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study, and biomedical authorship continues to have important academic, social, and financial implications.

Authors should meet following conditions

  1. Authorship credit should be based on
    • Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
    • Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
    • Final approval of the version to be published
  2. When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship defined below, and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal‐specific author and conflict-of-interest disclosure forms. When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and identify all individual authors as well as the group name.

To qualify for authorship, one must be available for each of the 3 categories of contributions listed below. To have made substantial contributions to the intellectual content of the paper as described above.

  1. (At least 1 of the 3 below)
    • Conception and design
    • Acquisition of data
    • Analysis and interpretation of data
  2. (At least 1 of 2 below)
    • Drafting of the manuscript
    • Critical revision of the manuscript for Important intellectual content
  3. (At least 1 below)
    • Statistical analysis
    • Obtaining funding
    • Administrative, technical, or material support
    • Supervision

JAIM appeals those that don’t meet the authorship - defined criteria, to be mentioned in Acknowledgement section of the manuscript. JAIM discourages "honorary" authorship and should also try to ensure that all those who qualify as authors are listed.

Corresponding author

The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Submission of manuscript also entails author/s disclose all their competing interests, including specific financial interests and relationships and affiliations relevant to the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. These are also to be disclosed in the Acknowledgment section of the manuscript. All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

Examples of potential conflicts of interest, which should be disclosed, include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed at the earliest stage possible.

Duties of authors

Reporting standards
An accurate account of the implemented work and results should be presented, along with an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable. Review and professional publication articles should also be accurate and objective, and editorial ‘opinion’ works should be clearly identified as such.

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, if practicable, and should in any event be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable time after publication.

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. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. For more information, please refer to Section 11 of this document.

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. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable.

Acknowledgement of sources

Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work. Information obtained privately, as in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, must not be used or reported without explicit, written permission from the source.

Information obtained in the course of confidential services, such as refereeing manuscripts or grant applications, must not be used without the explicit written permission of the author of the work involved in these services.

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. If the editor or the publisher learns from a third party that a published work contains a significant error, it is the obligation of the author to promptly retract or correct the paper or provide evidence to the editor of the correctness of the original paper.

Advertising policy 

JAIM has a policy of no advertising in the journal.

PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is the use of others’ published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) without attribution or permission, and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source. This applies whether the ideas or words are taken from abstracts, research grant applications, Institutional Review Board applications, or unpublished or published manuscripts in any publication format (print or electronic).

JAIM defines plagiarism as

Whenever an author uses another person’s exact words, they must be placed in quotation marks and a citation must be given. The reader of an article in JAIM must know which words are the author’s and which belong to someone else. Even documents in the public domain, such as government documents, must be attributed to their source.

Self-plagiarism

The author’s copying of her or his own previously published material: duplicate publication or “self-plagiarism.” If an author has published an article in Journal A, she or he may not send the same article with a few minor adjustments to Journal B. Nor may she or he take verbatim portions of the first article without quotation marks for use in a second article. Each publication should contain fresh writing, even if there is nothing new to report on the topic.

Inadequate acknowledgement of data or ideas

Most writers rely on the ideas and data of others, but doing so without naming the source is a form of plagiarism.

Copyright infringement

Occurs when an author copies (with or without attribution) significant portions of a published work, including tables and figures, without having obtained the permission of the person or publisher holding the copyright. When this plagiarized “writing” is published, the new publisher is guilty of violating the copyright held by the original publisher.

Excessive or poor rephrasing

An author may believe that juggling the words of a copied-and-pasted sentence from another article is adequate. It is not. Also, it is not acceptable for an author’s work to be made up largely of paraphrased sentences from other published material. And the ordering of information presented in an article must be original and not too closely follow another published work.

Policy for misconduct

JAIM policy on plagiarism is shaped by two desires: to inform authors of acceptable writing practices and to set a very high standard for the publication of peer-reviewed articles.

When plagiarism is detected, by either peer reviewers or staff editors, before or after acceptance, during editing, or at any time before publication, JAIM staff will alert the author, asking her or him to rewrite or quote exactly and to cite the original source.If the plagiarism is extensive-that is, if at least 25% of the original submission is plagiarized-the article may be rejected and the author’s employer notified of the violation. If plagiarism is detected after publication, the editors will notify readers of the infraction through an editor’s note in the journal, and the author’s employer may be notified of the breach.

Prof. Dr. Umid Kumar Shrestha, Editor in-Chief, Journal of Advances in Internal Medicine