Guide for Authors

Notice to Contributors

Once submitted, the manuscript cannot be withdrawn or sent elsewhere. The Section Editors or Editor-in-Chief reserve the right to edit, shorten, modify or reject submitted manuscripts even after provisional acceptance.  This decision may be based on English grammar, clarity, space limitations, journal style or preference of Section Editors or Editor-in-Chief. The editors may not opt to disclose the reason for rejection of a manuscript.

The copyright must be assigned to Iran University of Medical Sciences. The editor, editorial team or publisher will not be held liable or hold responsibility for any shortcomings or mistakes in publishing manuscripts.

 

Manuscript Submission

International Journal of Hospital Research accepts only manuscripts through online submission system which can be accessed at Journal website http://www.ijhr.iums.ac.ir. The cover letter, manuscript, every piece of arts and each additional file should be uploaded as a separate file. The step by step guide for submission can be found in the web site. Once manuscript is submitted, if relevant it will be sent to a section editor and then to at least to reviewers. The authors will be notified of the submission process and editorial decision via email.

 

Cover Letter

A cover letter is required to be submitted by the author should provide assurance that the manuscript is an original work and it is not under review on in press elsewhere. If part of the manuscript is presented as a conference abstract or contribute to other published work, it should be mentioned in the cover letter. The cover letter also should indicate the novelty of the work and explain why the study is important to the journal readership. Necessary acknowledgements, statements and declaration of financial support, as well as article category and author’s suggested reviewers should be included in the cover letter.

A statement declaring the study complies with ethical considerations should be provided in cover letter. Manuscripts reporting experimental research on human must include a statement in Methods section assuring: (1) the experiments have been performed with the approval of an appropriate ethical committed (2) informed consent was obtained from every individual enrolled in the study and (3) the study complies with the Declaration of Helsinki.

 

Manuscript Preparation

The manuscript and should be submitted in Microsoft Word in English and should be prepared according to the style of Uniform Requirement for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals a copy of which can be found at www.ijhr.iums.ac.ir.

 

Organization

The research articles are required to be organized according to the following sections: Title page, Abstract and Keywords, Background and objectives, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, Abbreviations (if applicable), Acknowledgements, Competing Interest, Authors’ contribution, References, Illustrations and Figures, Tables and Captions, Preparing Additional Files.

 

Title page

The title page should include the following:

Title: Should be provided with the shortest adequate length to cover the main points. Only the first letter words and abbreviations should be in upper case.

Running title: a shorter version of the title, not exceeding 40 characters to be used as page header

Author(s): Full name of all authors should be mentioned.

Affiliations: Author’s department, school and university/institution should be mentioned.

Corresponding author: one of the authors should be introduced as the corresponding author. Full address, telephone, fax and e-mail address should be written.

 Email address: The authors' e-mail, especially the corresponding author, should be an academic email

Abstract: An abstract with 250-300 words should be provided stating the reason for the study, the method used, the study findings and the conclusion. The abstracts of research articles and brief reports should be structured under following headlines: Background and objectives, Methods, Findings, Conclusion, Recommendations, Practical Implications (if applicable), Social Implications (if applicable), and Originality/value (if applicable). Authors need to be careful that the abstract reflects the content of the article accurately. The abstract should include the following sections: Background and Objectives, Methods, Results and Conclusion.

A list of 3-10 keywords must follow the abstract in the order of relative importance and relevance to the subject. 

 Article structure

Background and objectives:Author should summarize the rationale behind the research according to literature and scientific resources and explain the necessity and the aim the study. This section is potent for unwanted plagiarism, therefore the author should pay care to avoid direct incorporation of the paragraphs and sentence from literature. Rather authors should incorporate their inference from reviewing the literature. No phrase of containing more than 7 sequentially identical words to previous study should be included without citation. The background section should not provide an extensive review or historic evolution of the field. Rather it should summarize the trend of the most recent efforts in the area and provide convincing argument for how the study may help further advancement of the field.

 

Methods: In this section, author should describe the type of study, the material, apparatus and software exploited and the details of the study procedure to a resolution that allow the other researcher to reproduce the results with reasonable precision and without the need to communicate with the authors.

If a previously published method is employed in the study it should be referred by citation. If modified procedure is used only the author’s modification of the previously established method is needed to be explained in detail. If a database is consulted during the study, preferably cite an article that describes the database and if it is not available, the web address of the database should be cited as reference. The characteristics of the experimental subjects and their controls should be described. The level of the validity and reliability of the data provided from experiments and the methods used for data validation should be mentioned. Statistical methods should be given in detail. If study involve sampling, the sampling method, the sample size and the data distribution for all data sets should be mentioned. The statistical test used, the level of significance decided for, the statistical significance values (P-values) and preferentially the confidence intervals are required to be included.

In case the drugs and chemical are used the corresponding generic names, doses and routes of administration must be identified. Reports of experiments involving patients and healthy volunteers must demonstrate the steps taken to obtain consent and to maintain confidentiality. The procedures followed must be in accordance with institutional, regional, international guidelines and conform to accepted ethical standards.

 

Results:Important results should be summarized in the form of text, tables and figures without any commentary material which is related to discussion section. Data should not be repeated in tables and figures. The contents of tables, graphs, illustrations should not be repeated in the text; instead a reference to them may be given. Only those parts of the results not included in the summarized format may be mentioned in the text. Presentation of the results should be concise and restricted to those necessary to argue about the thesis of the article. When possible the uncertainty related to data should be reported by appropriate inclusion of standard deviations and confidence intervals. All quantities should be reported in SI units.

 

Discussion: In this section author analyses and interprets the results to examine their potential to support the study hypothesis. The data in the result section should not be repeated here. Discussion should focus on the new and important aspects of the study and the implication of the results to the main question of the study. The contrasts and similarity with other works done in the field should be discussed. Unexpected results or those inconsistent with the study hypotheses or previous findings should be critically analysed and explained in terms of exceptional possibilities, insufficient knowledge or surprising observation that may lead to generation of new hypotheses. New hypotheses can be stated but with emphasize on their being merely hypotheses. Based on the generated hypotheses, recommendation for comprehensive perspective of the study in future can be given.

 

Conclusion: A compact summarization of the general outcome and implication of the results should be provided.

 

Abbreviations:If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations can be provided, which should precede the competing interests and authors' contributions.

Competing interests: Authors are required to disclose any financial, personal or other association with other people or organizations that might pose an actual or potential competing interest in connection with the submitted article.

Authors’ contributions: The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified. The authors’ name should be abbreviated in this section (e.g. JMS for John Miller Smith).

Acknowledgements: Any substantive contributions from individuals and institutions including financial and material support, technical help, administrative organization, writing assistant or useful discussion should be acknowledged.

Conflict of interest: Authors must disclose all financial interests / affiliations that have affected the article.

 

References:International Journal of Hospital Research accepts references according to a style based on Vancouver Style. The referencing of papers should be done with one of the reference software such as Endnote, Zotero, mendeley,....

 

Tables: Tables should be placed in the main article file.

 

Figures: Figures must be submitted in separate files in the forms of tiff (.tif), jpeg (.jpg), png (.png) or Photoshop (.psd).  Authors should declare in cover letter that all figures included in their manuscript are original. If the figures have been reproduced from another source a copyright authorization letter is required. Letters, numbers, and symbols should be clear, uniform in size, and large and dark enough to be legible when the size of the figure is reduced to fit column width in the journal. Titles and detailed explanations should appear in the legends rather than in the figures. Dotted lines and decimal points should be dark enough to reproduce well. A resolution of 300 dpi for photographs/illustrations and 1200 dpi for line art is required.

 

Additional Files: Although International Journal of Hospital research does not restrict the length and quantity of data included, an author may prefer to provide large data sets, tables, movies or other information in additional files. The maximum size for additional files is 10 MB and files must be virus scanned on submission. Additional files should be named "Additional file 1" and so on and should be referenced explicitly by file name within the body of the article, e.g. ‘Additional File 1 provides the details of calculations’.

 

Peer-review process

Manuscripts will be assigned to an Assistant Editor who will supervise the review process and provides recommendations on acceptance to Editor-in-Chief who will then make the final decision. The manuscripts considered suitable for peer review will then be subject to two or more expert reviews. The journal aims for an initial decision within 2 weeks. Upon receiving reviewer comments authors are required to submit the revised manuscript and the reply to reviewers within 72 hours.

 

Proof

Gallery proof will be sent to corresponding author. The proof should be returned within 72 hours from receipt.

 

Reporting Standards

International Journal of Hospital Research follows the guidelines provided with initiatives that aim to improve reporting of biomedical studies:

Good Medical Publication Practice (GMPP2) for all types of study 

STROBE for observational studies

STARD for diagnosis accuracy studies

CONSORT for clinical trial studies

PRISMA for systematic review

RATS for qualitative studies

Authors are requested to make use of these guidelines when drafting the manuscripts and the peer reviewers will also be asked to refer to these checklists when evaluating these studies. Checklists for the mentioned reporting standards are available on IJHR website.

 

Editorial standards

International Journal of Hospital Research considers guidelines provided by International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), and European Association of Science Editors (EASE) and request authors to meet these guidelines.

 

Article Publishing Charges:

International Journal of Hospital Research does not charge for accepting articles and publishing articles is free.

Ethical considerations

The International Journal of Hospital Research policy regarding suspected scientific misconduct including plagiarism, fabricated data, falsification, and redundancy is based on the guidelines on good publication practice of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE; http://www.publicationethics.org). The Journal requires all authors to comply fully with current ethical standards for publication in their disciplines. Authors are responsible for the originality of manuscripts submitted to journal and the original data based on which the manuscript is provided must be available upon on editor request. All authors should have agreed to and be aware of the manuscript submission. The corresponding author must have the authority from all authors to act on their behalf in all matter related to publication of the manuscript. Authors are responsible for the contents of their manuscript, including article claims, conclusions, and appropriate citation, acknowledgments, and author contribution. The journal office will receive the manuscript based upon the perception that authors have the authority for publishing the work and that they guarantee that the manuscript, or one with substantially the same contents was not published previously or is not under review for publication elsewhere. Upon submission of the paper, it is expected that the authors will provide written assurance for the originality and the novelty of their work in a covering letter.

 

Checking Plagiarism: The plagiarism of articles submitted is checked in iThenticate.

 

Research Abuse Policy:
The members of the editorial board investigate in accordance with the rules in the COPE with any research misconduct as:

  • fraud, including plagiarism, forgery and distortion;
    - Citation violations;
    - Violations of writing, publication of an article in two journals,
    - Authors complain and contradict each other and ....

 

Clinical research:

In this journal, intervention articles (clinical trials) that do not have a ethics and IRCT ID do not investigated in the review process.

 

Copyright notice

IJHR requires the corresponding author to sign a copyright transfer agreement on behalf of all the authors to help maintaining and protecting IJHR ownership and rights and to provide the investigators to publish in high-quality journals. Upon the acceptance of the manuscript this agreement will be sent to the corresponding author and reception of the sign agreement will be necessary for publication of the manuscript.

 

Privacy statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Grant Support & Financial Disclosures

If your article is  extracted from a financial sponsored project at institution, please mention  in your article