Author Guidelines

Online submission

Submission should be made through online submission system at: http://jpc.tums.ac.ir

Upload the manuscript in a format compatible with Microsoft Word Windows. Upload cover letter, title page, table(s) and figure(s) as supplementary files in submission process.

Types of articles

The journal provides a medium for publication of original articles, review articles, case reports and letter to the editors.

Invited submissions including: editorials, commentary, perspectives, conference proceedings, book review and focuses.

Authorship

All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, (3) final approval of the version to be submitted. Please list up to six authors before using "et al".

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship as defined above should be listed in an acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support.

All authors of must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with publication of the manuscript or an institution or product that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or is important to the outcome of the study presented. Authors should also disclose conflict of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

Ethics

When reporting studies on human beings, 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 ). For prospective studies involving human participants, authors are expected to mention about approval of (regional/ national/ institutional or independent Ethics Committee or Review Board, obtaining informed consent from adult research participants and obtaining assent for children aged over 7 years participating in the trial. The age beyond which assent would be required could vary as per regional and/ or national guidelines. Ensure confidentiality of subjects by desisting from mentioning participants names, initials or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material.

Evidence for approval by a local Ethics Committee (for both human as well as animal studies) must be supplied by the authors on demand. The ethical standards of experiments must be in accordance with the guidelines provided by the CPCSEA and World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki on Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Humans for studies involving human beings). The journal will not consider any paper which is ethically unacceptable. A statement on ethics committee permission and ethical practices must be included in all research articles under the Materials and Methods section.

Clinical trials

This journal requires registration of randomized clinical trials in such public trial registries as those of the National Institutes of Health and the International Standard Randomized Controlled Trials. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME) has established a requirement that all clinical trials be entered in a public registry before the onset of patient enrollment, as a condition of consideration for publication. The definition of a clinical trial as established by the ICMJE is any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention and comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relation between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Health-related interventions include any intervention used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome (for example drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, dietary interventions, and process-of-care changes). Health outcomes include any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants, including pharmacokinetic measures and adverse events. Purely observational studies (those in which the assignment of the medical intervention is not at the discretion of the investigator) will not require registration. Further information can be found at http://www.icmje.org.

FORMATTING INSTRUCTIONS

COVER LETTER

This letter should be uploaded through online system as a word file. By an official letter corresponding author should state that:

1- The manuscript has not been and will not be published elsewhere or submitted elsewhere for publication.

2- To prevent the information on potential conflict of interest for authors from being overlooked or misplaced, mention this information in the cover letter.

3- Contact information for corresponding author. The name, mailing address, telephone and fax numbers and email of the author responsible for correspondence about the manuscript should be included.

MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION

To send electronically, manuscripts should be in word document (Microsoft Word 97, 2003, 2007). Manuscript, well written in English, should follow the style of the agreement detailed in the uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to Biomedical journals, a copy of which can be found at www.icmje.org. Please double check the article for spelling, structure and format mistakes. What follows is a series of recommendations on how the article should be like in order to process it faster and more efficiently.

WORD COUNT LIMITS

These numbers shows this journal word count limitations:.

Original Articles: 4000 words (Maximum number of references is 55; Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 7).

Review Articles: 4000 words (Maximum number of references is 80; Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 7).

Case Report: 1500 - 2000 words (Maximum number of references is 30; Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 4)

Letters to the Editor: 500 - 700 words (Maximum number of references is 5; Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 2)

Editorials: 1600 words (Maximum number of references is 5; Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 2)

Perspectives: 4000 words (Maximum number of references is 50; Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 7)

Focuses: 2000 words (Maximum number of references is 30, Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 3, no abstract needed; should include a 100 word introduction)

Commentary: 1600 words (Maximum number of references is 10; Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 3)

Conference proceeding: 1600 words (Maximum number of references is 10; Maximum Number of illustrations/Tables is 2)

Book review: 700 words (no abstract needed, no references needed, cover image should be included)

FONTS

To distinguish different parts of the article, it is recommended to use the font Times New Roman size 12 for the body, size 12 bold for subheadings, size 14 for headings and size 14 bold for the title.

TITLE PAGE

The title page should contain:

1- Article title (concise, but including main focus of the paper)

2- Name of each author

3- Highest academic degree, position title, and/or academic appointment of each author

4- Names of departments and institution with which each author is affiliated

5- Name, address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address of corresponding author;

ABSTRACT AND KEYWORDS

[Required for original articles, review articles, case reports, perspectives, commentary]

An abstract of 250 words should be provided to state the reason for the study, the main findings and the conclusions drawn from the observation. Abstract of original articles should be structured under the following headings: backgrounds, objectives, methods, results and conclusion. A list of 3-6 keywords provided according to MeSH terms at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/authors.html.

ARTICLE BODY

The rest of the article differs according to article type but generally includes the following headings: introduction, material and methods, results, discussion and references.

BACKGROUND

This should summarize the purpose and the rationale for the study. It should neither review the subject extensively nor should it have data or conclusions of the study. Author(s) should declare objectives/aims of the study.

MATERIALS/PATIENTS AND METHODs

This should include exact method or observation or experiment. If an apparatus is used, its manufacturer's name and address should be given in parenthesis. If the method is established, give reference but if the method is new, give enough information so that another author is able to perform it. If a drug is used, its generic name, dose and route of administration must be given. Statistical method must be mentioned and specify any general computer program used. The Info system used should be clearly mentioned.

RESULT

It must be presented in the form of text, tables and illustrations. The contents of the tables should not be all repeated in the text. Instead, a reference to the table number may be given. Long articles may need sub-headings within some sections (especially the Results and Discussion parts) to clarify their contents.

DISCUSSION

This should emphasize the present findings and the variations or similarities with other work done in the field by other workers. The detailed data should not be repeated in the discussion again. Emphasize the new and important aspects of the study and the conclusions that follow from them. It must be mentioned whether the hypothesis mentioned in the article is true, false or no conclusions can be derived.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be covered in the acknowledgment section. It should include persons who provided technical help, writing assistance and departmental head that only provided general support. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.

TABLES

All tables must be included at the end of the manuscript.

 Tables in the word file should be separated by page break (each table in a separate page).

 Each Table should have borders with normal style without any colored row or column.

 The style of table should be simple.

 Each cell contains only one paragraph or one line.

FIGURES

Scanned graph from other resources will not be accepted to publish.

 All Figures should be in the form of encapsulated postscript (.eps), power point (.ppt), portable document format (.pdf), Photoshop (.psd), TIF (.tiff), PNG (png) or JPG (.jpg).

The raw data of the charts should be uploaded in Microsoft excel format (MS Office 1997-2003)

 Please scan all images in at least 300dpi. Most consumer scanners scan in sRGB by default. However, if you are using a high-end scanner then Adobe RGB is recommended for optimum color depth. Colorspace should be in RGB.

 Image quality specification for Line art (an image composed of lines and text which does not contain tonal or shaded areas) has resolution of 900 dpi, halftone (a continuous tone photograph which contains no text) with 300 dpi and combination of both should have 500 dpi of resolution.

 We will NOT accept any images with resolution below 300 dpi.

UNITS, SYMBOLS, AND ABBREVIATIONS

Internationally accepted units (International System of Units), symbols, and abbreviations must be used. Abbreviations should be used sparingly and must be introduced in parentheses upon first mention. Abbreviations that have meaning only within the context of the specific manuscript should be avoided..Authors should declare in the cover letter that all figures of their manuscripts are original, otherwise the original source of figures should be mentioned and reprint form must be uploaded in the attachments.

DRUG NAMES

Generic drug names must be used in the title and throughout the manuscript text. The proprietary name should be included in parentheses, along with the name of manufacturer, and city upon first mention in the text.

REFERENCES

This Journal accepts references according to a style based on Vancouver style (with some minor changes). Vancouver, a numbered style, follows rules established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. All references, including those related primarily to figures and tables, must appear in the text and be cited consecutively. Identify  References in text, tables, and figure legends by Arabic numerical in parentheses. Journal names should be abbreviated as they appear in PubMed. Those not appearing in PubMed should be spelled out. Referenced articles that are cited as "In press" must include the title of the journal that has accepted the paper. List all authors when there are 6 or fewer; with 7 or more authors; list the first 3, followed by et al. 

Standard journal article

Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med 2002 25;347(4):284-7.

BOOKS

Personal author(s)

Murray PR, Rosenthal KS, Kobayashi GS, Pfaller MA. Medical microbiology. 4th ed. St. Louis: Mosby; 2002.

Editor(s), compiler(s) as author

Gilstrap LC 3rd, Cunningham FG, VanDorsten JP, editors. Operative obstetrics. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill; 2002.

Author(s) and editor(s)

Breedlove GK, Schorfheide AM. Adolescent pregnancy. 2nd ed. Wieczorek RR, editor. White Plains (NY): March of Dimes Education Services; 2001.

Chapter in a book

Meltzer PS, Kallioniemi A, Trent JM. Chromosome alterations in human solid tumors. In: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, editors. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York: McGraw-Hill; 2002. p. 93-113.

Conference proceedings

Harnden P, Joffe JK, Jones WG, editors. Germ cell tumours V. Proceedings of the 5th Germ Cell Tumour Conference; 2001 Sep 13-15; Leeds, UK. New York: Springer; 2002.

Conference paper

Christensen S, Oppacher F. An analysis of Koza's computational effort statistic for genetic programming. In: Foster JA, Lutton E, Miller J, Ryan C, Tettamanzi AG, editors. Genetic programming. EuroGP 2002: Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Genetic Programming; 2002 Apr 3-5; Kinsdale, Ireland. Berlin: Springer; 2002. p. 182-91.

Dissertation

Borkowski MM. Infant sleep and feeding: a telephone survey of Hispanic Americans [dissertation]. Mount Pleasant (MI): Central Michigan University; 2002.

Patent
Pagedas AC, inventor; Ancel Surgical R&D Inc., assignee. Flexible endoscopic grasping and cutting device and positioning tool assembly. United States patent US 20020103498. 2002 Aug 1.

Scientific or technical report
Issued by funding/sponsoring agency:
Yen GG (Oklahoma State University, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stillwater, OK). Health monitoring on vibration signatures. Final report. Arlington (VA): Air Force Office of Scientific Research (US), Air Force Research Laboratory; 2002 Feb. Report No.: AFRLSRBLTR020123. Contract No.: F496209810049.

WWW document
These are the details you need for referencing a web document:
Author/editor's surname author/editor's first name or initial. editor [if appropriate]. Title of page. Title of site. Last update or copyright date. URL (Access date).
Below is a sample reference for a web document.
Royal College of General Practitioners. The Primary Health Care Team. RCGP website 2003 [cited 2004 Sep 22]; Available from: URL: http://www.rcgp.org.uk/information/publications/information/PDFInfo/21_OCT_03.pdf

REVIEW PROCESS

All submitted manuscripts are subject to peer review and editorial approval. Articles will be sent to at least three reviewers. Sometimes, the reviewers are masked as to the identity of the authors and their affiliation. Authors are usually notified within 1-2 months about the acceptability of their manuscript. Reviewers are selected based on their expertise within the topic area of the submission, and their purpose is to assist the authors and the journal by providing a critical review of the manuscript. On receiving reviewers comments, authors are requested to send the revised article, and a copy of their reply to the reviewers, including the comment and explaining the replies to questions and changes made to the revised version. Communication regarding a specific manuscript will take place between the journal and the designated corresponding author only.

PROOFS

Proofs will be sent to the corresponding author. Galley proofs should be returned within 72 hours from receipt with clear indication of any changes.

Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor. We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication: please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility. We may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.