Update July 2020:
Research Reporting Guidelines and Supporting Documents for Authors are available to download. Click here to download CONSORT template and checklist, STROBE statement, PRISMA Checklist, MOOSE checklist and other resources for preparing and reporting clinical trials, observationbal studies, case reports, systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
OPEN ACCESS POLICY AND REDISTRIBUTION
Electronic physician is an open access journal, which means that all articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication. Our articles our published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
AUTHOR GUIDELINE
1. Types and scope of articles:
Electronic Physician is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes original articles, reviews (traditional reviews and systematic reviews), Meta-analyses, case reports and other common types of articles related to all areas of basic and clinical medical sciences and all disciplines of health sciences. Editorials, letters to the editor, opinions, and other short articles are also welcomed. Topics of interest include all subjects that relate to the practice of medicine and the betterment of public health worldwide. Commencing on January 2018, the following research designs have the highest chance of being published in our journal:
1) Meta-analyses
2) Randomized Controlled Trials
3) Prospective Cohort studies
4) Systematic-reviews with high impact on great policy makings of health and clinical practice
5) Matched case-control studies
6) Rare and unique Case-Reports, and those case-reports with high value in education of clinical science
2. Manuscript preparation:
The "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts (URM) Submitted to Biomedical Journals" is incorporated into our review and publication process. Please visit http://www.icmje.org for more details. You are encouraged to prepare the reference section of the manuscript using the standard introduced by URM. Please click here to download the template of the manuscript. Authors should use the template to prepare their manuscript, especially the font, the size of the font, list of authors, references, acknowledgment section, and other instructions in the template file. The authors are advised to use the standard checklists for presenting their research. A list of supporting documents for CONSORT 2010 (Randomized Controlled Trials), CARE checklist (case reports), PRISMA checklist, STROBE, STARD, MOOSE and SPIRIT checklists are available here.
3. Research ethics and publication ethics:
Electronic Physician is a member of, and subscribes to the principles of, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Electronic Physician has zero tolerance for academic misconduct, including "Duplicate Publication," "Salami Publication," "Plagiarism", "Fake Submissions", "Ghost Authorship", "Fabrication of Data", and "Fake External Reviewer Suggestions". All manuscripts are investigated thoroughly regarding any potential unethical conduct. All of the required documents about the research (clinical trial registration ID, research ethics approval, authorization letter for publishing case reports, etc.) are required. Regarding the plagiarism, all submissions will be checked for potential copy-paste jobs using iThenticate.
All the procedures in studies on human must be in conformity with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the local Human Research Ethics Committee. Appropriate approval, licensing or registration should be obtained before the research begins and details should be provided in the report (e.g. Institutional Review Board, Research Ethics Committee approval, national licensing authorities for the use of animals). Authors should supply evidence that reported research received the appropriate approval and was carried out ethically (e.g. copies of approvals, licenses, participant consent forms). Researchers should not generally publish or share identifiable individual data collected in the course of research without specific consent from the individual (or their representative). The researchers must obtain informed consent from all participants (or their parents in the case of pediatrics research).
4. References:
References should be written in compliance with the ‘Citing Medicine, 2nd edition: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers’ published by National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (Aailable from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7256 ). Some authors do not use correct abbreviations for journals. Please use the abbreviations of the titles of journals in the reference section. For more information, visit the ISSN website at http://www.issn.org/2-22661-LTWA-online.php and the National Library of Medicine at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7256/ (Look at the appendix section of that page for abbreviation of journals) for further details. The correct abbreviations for journals also can be found at the journals’ websites. Please add PubMed PMID (or PubMed central PMCID) of articles (if the references appear in Pubmed), and add the digital object identifier (DOI) or the URL (in the DOI system) if the reference has a DOI. Visit the following link to search the PMIDs and DOIs of articles: http://www.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery (This link provides doi for those journal articles that use CrossRef doi service, therefore there are many articles with DOI, but not available on Crossref).
5. Expected time required for the peer-review process:
Authors can expect to receive the first round of reviewers' comments and the initial result of their submissions within 3-6 months for routine submissions, and within 3-10 weeks for fast Track submissions (depending on the availability of expert reviewers).
6. Language of Journal Articles:
6.1. English editing:
The manuscripts submitted to Electronic Physician should be written in English. All accepted manuscripts must go under advanced English editing by native editors from USA or Britain (such as AJE: https://www.aje.com, Editage https://www.editage.com, and MehrPub: http://www.mehrpublishing.com). The authors can use the editing service of any native language editor of their choice. Native English editors proofread and grammar check the manuscripts and perform the highest quality of advanced copy editing and re-writing of sentences and paragraphs to ensure that their meaning is clear and professional in tone.
Since Native English editors provide numerous comments to the authors, we consider the editing step as the final reviewers' comments before preparing the pre-publication version of the manuscripts. The authors will find English editors' comments, suggestions, and corrections to be very valuable guidance for appropriate scientific writing for academic journals. Thus, our authors can use the skills they learn during this step to their own advantage in writing future manuscripts.
7. Conflict of Interest (COI):
All submissions must be accompanied by a completed Conflict of Interest (COI) form.
The COI form is available at: http://www.ephysician.ir/tasavir/ConflictOfInterestForm.pdf
8. Publication fee:
Publishing in this journal is free of charges for all authors from low and middle income countries (more than 90% of our authors). Also, authors from high income countries are eligible to apply for 20-80% discount. Click here to read more about our new scheme for a waiver of the publication fee.
9. Withdrawal policy:
In general, and as we stated on the Cover Letter Template, submitting author confirms that the submitted manuscript cannot be withdrawn by author without agreement of the journal. Submitting author may request manuscript withdrawal before initiating the peer-review process, normally within 3 days of submission. Such application will be considered immediately without asking any reason. During review process, the author may withdraw the manuscript by providing a compelling ethical reason. Manuscript withdrawn will not be allowed for the accepted manuscript (whether published galley/early version or not). We don’t allow authors to play an unethical game of withdrawing the article after acceptance to submit in another journal/publication and waste precious editorial and reviewer resources.