Submissions

Author Guidelines

Authors are invited to make a submission to this journal. All submissions will be assessed by an editor to determine whether they meet the aims and scope of this journal. Those considered to be a good fit will be sent for peer review before determining whether they will be accepted or rejected.

Before making a submission, authors are responsible for obtaining permission to publish any material included with the submission, such as photos, documents and datasets. All authors identified on the submission must consent to be identified as an author. Where appropriate, research should be approved by an appropriate ethics committee in accordance with the legal requirements of the study's country.

An editor may desk reject a submission if it does not meet minimum standards of quality. Before submitting, please ensure that the study design and research argument are structured and articulated properly. The title should be concise and the abstract should be able to stand on its own. This will increase the likelihood of reviewers agreeing to review the paper. When you're satisfied that your submission meets this standard, please follow the checklist below to prepare your submission.

Please:

1. Provide full affiliation information (full institutional address and e-mail address) for all authors, and
2. Indicate who is/are the corresponding author(s).

Criteria for authorship are based on the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to the journal. Being an author implies full responsibility for the article’s content and that the work conforms to our editorial policies. For large, multi-center collaborations, the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript must be listed as authors.

Details of each author’s contribution must be listed in the Author contributions section.

Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. The involvement of any professional medical writer assistance must be declared.

Title

Please provide a concise and specific title that clearly reflects the content of the article.

Abstract

Abstracts should be up to 300 words long and provide a succinct summary of the article. They should be structured into Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. Although the abstract should explain why the article might be interesting, the importance of the work should not be over-emphasized. Citations should not be used in the abstract. Abbreviations, if needed, should be spelled out.

Keywords

Authors should supply up to eight relevant keywords that describe the subject of their article. These will improve the visibility of your article.

Main Body

The format of the main body of the article is flexible: it should be concise, making it easy to read and review, and presented in a format that is appropriate for the type of study presented.

For most Research Articles, the following standard format will be the most appropriate:

• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Conclusions/Discussion

Standards of reporting: Standards of reporting guidelines help authors to ensure that they have provided a comprehensive description of their research, making it easier for others to assess and reproduce the work.

Articles Submitted that report clinical trials must adhere to the CONSORT reporting guidelines. We ask authors to include a copy of the original trial protocol and a completed CONSORT checklist and flow diagram as supporting files, which will be published alongside the article. The trial registration number and registration date must be included in the Methods section. Any deviation from the original trial protocol must be explained in the article.

The journal endorses the ARRIVE guidelines for studies involving animals. The relevant information outlined in these guidelines should be included in the appropriate section of the article.

Reproducibility:

The journal is committed to serving the research community by ensuring that all articles include sufficient information to allow others to reproduce the work. With this in mind, Methods sections should provide sufficient details of the materials and methods used so that the work can be repeated by others. The section should also include a brief discussion of allowances made (if any) for controlling bias or unwanted sources of variability. Any limitations of the datasets should be discussed.

When antibodies are used, the species in which the antibody was raised, the manufacturing company or source laboratory, the catalog or reference number, and whether it is a polyclonal or monoclonal antibody should be included. Besides, if the antibody has been previously validated, a reference to the validation study should be included. If the antibody has not been validated, full details of the dilution and use of the antibody should be given in the Methods section.

Where proprietary software is used for analysis, we require that details of an open-access alternative that can perform an equivalent function are provided. Where authors have written their own code in the course of their analysis, we require this to be written in (or compatible with) an open-source programming language.

We encourage authors to add Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) to their article to unambiguously identify the following types of resources: antibodies, genetically modified organisms, software tools, data, databases, and services. If the study involves the use of a questionnaire that has been validated by a previous study, this should be cited and a URL link provided to the validated questionnaire. If the authors have created a novel questionnaire (or performed a translation), the article must state if the questionnaire has been validated, and provide the following information:

• Initial ace validity testing
• Preliminary pilot testing
• Reliability testing (internal consistency, test-retest, inter-rater)
• Any changes implemented resulting from preliminary testing

The novel questionnaire should be provided as extended data.

Ethics policies:

All research must have been conducted within an appropriate ethical framework. For studies involving humans or animals, details of approval by the authors’ institution or an ethics committee must be provided in the Methods section. Please refer to the detailed ‘Ethics’ section in our editorial policies for more information.

Clinical trials:

If the data associated with your article relate to a clinical trial then the Trial Registration details must be provided: name of a registry, registry number, registration date, and URL of the trial in the registry database. We support the public disclosure of all clinical trial results (as mandated in the US FDA Amendments Act, 2007).

Data (and Software) Availability

Underlying data

All articles must include a Data Availability Statement, even where there is no data associated with the article.

If you are describing new software, please make the source code available on a Version Control System (VCS) such as GitHub, BitBucket, or SourceForge, and provide details of the repository and the license under which the software can be used in the article.

Reporting Guidelines

Articles in the journal must comply with consensus-based minimum reporting guidelines for research.

Checklists are available for several reporting guidelines, including:

• Randomized controlled trials (CONSORT) and protocols (SPIRIT)
• Systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) and protocols (PRISMA-P)
• Observational studies (STROBE)
• Case reports (CARE)
• Qualitative research (COREQ; SRQR)
• Pre-clinical animal studies (ARRIVE)

Consent:

For articles involving patient/participant data or information (e.g. personal genomics articles, case reports, clinical trials, questionnaires, observations), authors must ensure that they have written informed consent from all the subjects involved (or their legal guardian for a minor, or next of kin if the participant is deceased). Please be ready to provide copies of such consent forms, if requested by the SJHR-Africa Ethics team.

Author Contributions

We are using the CRediT Taxonomy to capture author contributions as we believe that having more detail of who did what brings transparency, enables recognition for researchers, and provides greater accountability for all involved.

You do not need to include an Author Contributions section in your manuscript: on submission, you will be asked for the contributions made by each author, to be selected from the list below. Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section.

Grant Information

Please state who funded the work, whether it is your employer, a grant funder, etc. Please do not list funding that you have that is not relevant to this specific piece of research. For each funder, please state the funder’s name, the grant number where applicable, and the individual to whom the grant was assigned.

If your work was not funded by any grants, please include the section entitled “Grant information” and state: ‘The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work.

Acknowledgments

This section should acknowledge anyone who contributed to the research or the writing of the article but who does not qualify as an author; please clearly state how they contributed. The authors should obtain permission to include the name and affiliation, of all those mentioned in the Acknowledgments section. Please note that grant funding should not be listed here.

Supplementary Material

To ensure all materials associated with a manuscript are visible, FAIR, and subject to peer review, the journal does not accept supplementary material. Additional materials that support the key claims in the paper but are not absolutely required to follow the study design and analysis of the results, e.g. questionnaires, or supporting images or tables, can be included as extended data. Extended data should be deposited in an approved repository and listed as part of the data availability statement.

References

References can be listed in any standard referencing style as long as it is consistent between references within a given article. However, the basic requirements include:

• Journal abbreviations should follow the Index Medicus/MEDLINE abbreviation approach.
• Preprints can be cited and listed in the reference list.
• Only articles, books and book chapters, datasets and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers/data repositories, may be cited. Unpublished abstracts, papers that have been submitted to a journal but not yet accepted, and personal communications should instead be included in the text; they should be referred to as ‘personal communications’ or ‘unpublished reports’ and the researchers involved should be named. The authors are responsible for getting permission to quote any personal communications from the cited individuals.
• Weblinks, URLs, and links to the authors’ own websites should be included as hyperlinks within the main body of the article, and not as references.
• References to trials on a clinical trial database should be as follows: [Authors/name of group], [title of the trial], In ClinicalTrials.gov [cited year month date], Available from [URL of the link from ClinicalTrials.gov].
• Datasets published or deposited elsewhere (for example, in Dryad, etc.) should be listed in the "References" section and the citation to the dataset should follow one of these examples.

Figures and Tables:

All figures and tables should be cited and discussed in the article text. Figure legends and tables should be added at the end of the manuscript. Tables should be formatted using the ‘insert table’ function in Word or provided as an Excel file. For larger tables or spreadsheets of data, please see our data guidelines. Files for figures are usually best uploaded as separate files through the submission system (see below for information on formats).

Any photographs must be accompanied by written consent to publish from the individuals involved. Any distinguishing features, including medical record numbers or codes in the case of clinical images that could be used to identify the patient or participant concerned, must be removed from the images.

Titles and legends: Each figure or table should have a concise title of no more than 15 words. A legend for each figure and table should also be provided that briefly describes the key points and explains any symbols and abbreviations used. The legend should be sufficiently detailed so that the figure or table can stand alone from the main text.

Permissions: If reusing a figure or table from a previous publication, the authors are responsible for obtaining permission from the copyright holder and for the payment of any fees (if applicable). Please include a note in the legend to state that: ‘This figure/table has been reproduced with permission from [include original publication citation]’.

Figure formats: For all figures, the color mode should be RGB or grayscale.

Line art: Examples of line art include graphs, diagrams, flow charts, and phylogenetic trees. Please make sure that text is at least 8pt, the lines are thick enough to be clearly seen at the size the image will likely be displayed (between 75-150 mm width, which converts to one or two columns width, respectively), and that the font size and type are consistent between images. Figures should be created using a white background to ensure that they display correctly online.

If you submit a graph, please export the graph as an EPS file using the program you used to create the graph (e.g. SPSS). If this is not possible, please send us the original file in which the graph was created (e.g. if you created the graph in Excel, send us the Excel file with the embedded graph).

If you submit other forms of line art such as flow charts, diagrams or text to be displayed as an image, please export the image as an EPS file (e.g. if creating phylogenetic trees with specialized programs), or send us the original file that was used to create the image (e.g. EPS or AI files if Adobe Illustrator was used, or a DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX or equivalent file if Word or PowerPoint was used).

If none of the above options is possible then we also accept uncompressed TIFFs with a resolution of at least 600dpi at the size, they are likely to be displayed at (see above).

Images (if applicable)

Photographs and microscopy images: Photographs and microscopy images should be submitted as uncompressed TIFFs with a resolution of at least 300dpi at the size they are likely to be displayed (see above).

Mixed images: Images that are a mix of half-tone images and line art (e.g. annotated gels or images with scale bars) should be submitted as TIFF files at a resolution of 500dpi or vector files (e.g. EPS or Adobe Illustrator files). Please ensure that the text size is at least 8pt and lines are thick enough to be clearly visible at the size the image will be displayed.

Images to be used as data: If you are submitting photographic images as part of your raw dataset, please submit them as uncompressed TIFF files.

Electronic manipulation of images: The clarity of figures may be improved using image-editing software, but this must be done transparently and without misrepresenting the data (and the original, unaltered source data must be provided with the article). Brightness, contrasts, or color balance may be used to enhance electronic images, but such changes must be applied to the whole image; any non-linear adjustments must be made explicit in the figure legend. Specific features within an image must not be added or changed (e.g. amplified, removed, or obscured); and if figures are composed of images that have come from different sources, such as different gels, or different parts of the same source, this must be made clear on the figure (e.g. by adding dividing lines). Authors are required to include details of all modifications made to images published as figures or uploaded as data in the Methods section of an article, including the name of the software (with version number) used to make these modifications.

The policy of screening for plagiarism.

Plagiarism is scientific misconduct and should be addressed as such. “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. The intent and effect of plagiarism are to mislead the reader as to the contributions of the plagiarizer. This applies to 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.

Self-plagiarism refers to the practice of an author using portions of their previous writings on the same topic in another of their publications, without specifically citing it formally in quotes. This practice is widespread and sometimes unintentional, as there are only so many ways to say the same thing on many occasions, particularly when writing the methods section of an article.

Direct plagiarism is the plagiarism of the text. Mosaic plagiarism is the borrowing of ideas and opinions from a source and a few verbatim words or phrases without crediting the author. 

Papers submitted to the journal will be screened for plagiarism using by iThenticate and AntiplagiatRU plagiarism detection tools. The journal will immediately reject papers leading to plagiarism or self-plagiarism.

Before submitting articles to reviewers, those are first checked for similarity/plagiarism tool, by a member of the editorial team. The papers submitted must have a similarity level of less than 10 %. Similarity per each detected reference also must be a maximum of 1 %.

Note: All authors are suggested to use plagiarism detection software to do the similarity checking before submitting their manuscript to the journal. 

Authors can adhere to the following steps to report plagiarism: 

1. Inform the editor of the journal where a plagiarized article is published.
2. Send original and plagiarized articles with plagiarized parts highlighted.
3. If evidence of plagiarism is convincing, the editor should arrange for a disciplinary meeting.
4. Editor of the journal where the plagiarized article should communicate with the editor of the journal containing the original article to rectify the matter.
5. The plagiarist should be asked to explain.
6. In the case of nonresponse in the stipulated time or an unsatisfactory explanation, the article should be permanently retracted.
7. The author should be blacklisted and debarred for submitted an article to a particular journal for at least 5 years.
8. The concerned head of the institution from which work is sent has to be notified.

The author bears the responsibility for checking whether material submitted is subject to copyright or ownership rights, e.g. figures, tables, photographs, illustrations, trade literature, and data. The author will need to obtain permission to reproduce any such items and include these permissions with their final submission. Where use is so restricted, the editorial office and Publisher must be informed with the final submission of the material. Please add any necessary acknowledgments to the typescript, preferably in the form of an Acknowledgments section at the end of the paper. Credit the source and copyright of photographs, figures, illustrations, etc. in the supplementary captions.

Note: Any case of plagiarism should be immediately reported to;

plagiarism@sjpublisher.org