Editorial Policy

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 following salient points on Ethics and Malpractice

  1. Publication and authorship :
  •  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 peer review process.
  • All authors have to significantly contribute to the research.
  • Statement that all data in 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 publication of correction or retraction.
  • Preserve anonymity of reviewers.

IJPO follows the Editorial responsibilities as noted by COPE guidelines: Click Here

  1. Publishing ethics issues
  • Monitoring/safeguarding publishing ethics by 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.

Open Access Policy

International Journal of Paediatric Orthopaedics is open access journal and all articles are available free immediately after publication. the articles are available under creative common licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Self archiving of  pre-print and post-print and publisher’s version/PDF is allowed freely.

The journal holds the copyright for the article but the authors are free to distribute under creative common licence. Copyright held is simply to acknowledge the journal in any such distribution and sharing of content.

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 have 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 which 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 send for correct formatting before review process.
  • Manuscript that get approval from editorial board and are formatted as per guidelines, will be send 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 author, Institution or place of origin of the manuscript. The journal wishes to publish names of all our reviewers, however the reviewers names will be kept blinded in terms of specific manuscripts.
  • 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 10 to 12 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 send to authors for approval.
  • Page proofs will be sent to the corresponding author, which has to be returned within 4 days.

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.
  • Order of naming the contributors should be based on the relative contribution of the contributor. Once submitted the order cannot be changed without written consent of all the contributors.
  • For an original article the number of contributors should not exceed six; for case reports, 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.

Contributors’ form and copyright transfer form

The contributors’ form and copyright transfer form duly signed by all the authors / contributors (in the same sequence as to be published in the journal) is to be uploaded directly on website at the time of submission of new manuscript. Manuscript submission will be considered incomplete till the completed forms are submitted.

Online Submission of the Manuscripts

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.

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 was 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.

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 per cent 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.

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 in the title page of the manuscript.

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 or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication.

Informed consent for this purpose requires that the patient be shown the manuscript to be published. When informed consent has been obtained, it should be indicated in the article and copy of the consent should be attached with the covering letter.

 Sending a revised manuscript

  • Before submitting a revised manuscript, contributors are requested to ensure that each and every comment of the reviewers/editorial board is answered.
  • Also mention the changes in the column in form of Page No. & Line No.
  • These changes should be clearly mentioned in the revised manuscript.

Copyrights

The whole of the literary matter in the journal is under copyright and cannot be reproduced without the written permission of the Editorial Board.

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 this is an original publication and should sign the contributors form and conflict of interest form for each publication.

Plagiarism is checked for all articles by using online plagiarism checker tool: http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/

Open Access Policy

All articles of the journal will be available open access immediately after publication.