Author Guidelines

Author Guidelines

Submitted manuscript, should embrace the following criteria:

 Content should not be related to local issues but preferably with critical national or global items.

  • Having innovative and creative outcome.
  • Methods should preferably be advanced and reproducible.
  • IJPH accepts manuscripts written in American English. 

Types of Manuscripts

Original articles:

These include randomized controlled trials, intervention studies, studies of screening and diagnostic test, outcome studies, and cost-effectiveness analyses. The text of original articles amounting to utmost 3000 words (excluding Abstract, References and Tables) should include Title; the Ab­stract; Introduction; Ma­terials & Methods; Results; Discussion; Conclusion; Ac­knowl­edge­ment; Ref­erences, Tables and Figures (Not more than 4500 words). 

Review Articles:

They should be written by authors considered experts on the subject. Therefore, the corresponding author of the review article must be one of the authors of at least three articles presented in Reference section. Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are more welcomed and they should respectively follow the PRISMA (http://www.prisma-statement.org/) and MOOSE guidelines (http://www.consort-statement.org). Review articles must include an abstract of no more than 250 words, a main text between 2000-3000 words excluding up to 90 references, and up to 6 tables and/or figures (altogether 5500-6000 words).

Short Communications:

Short communications are brief reports of research works containing new findings, which are not exceeding 2500 words from introduction through references. The Short Communication consists of Abstract, main body including Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion; Acknowledgement, References, Tables and Figures (Not more than 3000 words).

Case reports: 

Case reports are accepted provided they are of exceptional interest for readers. The case report consists of Abstract (unstructured), Introduction, Case Report, Discussion, Acknowledgements, and References. Case reports must not exceed 1,000 words, 15 references and a reasonable amount of tables and/or figures (Not more than 2500 words).

Letters to the Editor:

Letters could be of two types, commenting either on recently published articles or reporting cases, outbreaks, or original research. The former must be received within 2 months of publication of the article to which they refer and should be no longer than 500 words. The latter should contain no more than 1000 words altogether including up to 10 references and 2 figures and/or tables. They should not be divided into sections. 

Other:

Guest Editorial is solicited by the Editorial Board. National Reports or similar cases are accepted based on confirmation by Editorial Board. 

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

  1. Papers submitted for publica­tion should describe original work, not previ­ously published else­where, totally or partly. Manuscripts must be submitted only in English and should be written according to sound gram­mar and proper terminol­ogy. Submission is only acceptable via Jour­nal website : http://ijph.tums.ac.ir.
  2. Manuscript must be accompanied by a cover­ing let­ter to the Editor-in-Chief, in­cluding title and au­thor(s) name and under­taking that it has not been pub­lished or sub­mitted elsewhere.
  3. The title page of the paper should only con­tain the ti­tle, name(s), degree(s) and ad­dresses (Tel, Fax, and Email) of the au­thor(s).

The manuscript should include Title; No au­thor(s) name; the Ab­stract; Introduction; Ma­terials & Methods; Results; Discussion; Ac­knowl­edge­ment and Ref­erences.

The Abstract (no more than 250 words) in structured for­mat as Background, Methods, Results and Conclusion followed by 3 to 5 Keywords must be presented.

Tables in limited numbers should be sub­mitted with the captions placed above. Do not submit tables as pho­tograph. Place explanatory matters in footnotes, not in the heading.

Figures should be in limited numbers, with high quality artwork and mounted on separate pages. The cap­tions should be placed below.

The same data should not be presented in tables, fig­ures and text, simultane­ously. 

  1. References:

The reference system for our journal is Vancouver. You should write the reference numbers (in parentheses) as they enter the text and arrange them in the Reference section in order to their entrance in the text not alphabetically.

The refer­ences should ob­serve the following style:

 Article: Jarvis WR, Komshian SV (1995). Epi­de­miology of nosocomial fungal infections. Clin In­fect Dis, 20 (6): 1526-30.

Chapter: Hillyer GV (1998). Immunodiagnosis of hu­man and animal fasciolosis. In: Fasciolo­sis. Ed, JP Dal­ton. CABI Publishing, 1st Oxon, Wal­ling­ford, UK, pp. 435-48.

Book: Charmaz K (1991). Good days, bad days: The self in chronic illness and time. 2nd ed. New Brunswick: Rut­gers University Press. New York.

Monograph on the Internet:  Lundstedt S (2003). Analysis of PAHs and their transformation products in contaminated soil and remedial processes. University of Amster­dam, the Netherlands.  www.google.com

Thesis: Mohammadi MM. Infant sleep and feeding [PhD thesis]. School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran; 2002.

 

Note: If the authors have the article prepared using EndNote, we prefer to receive it.

If necessary, please use et al. only after mentioning 3 authors. 

  1. Abbreviations and symbols:

Please use only stan­dard abbre­viations. Avoid using them in the title and ab­stract. The full term for which an abbre­viation stands should precede its first use in the text unless it is a stan­dard unit of meas­urement.

  1. Clinical trial registry:

Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol, assignment of interventions (methods allocation to treatment groups), and the method of masking (blinding), based on the CONSORT Statement (http://www.consort-statement.org). Iranian articles for this sort should be registered first via (www.irct.ir/‎) because no RCT articles are accepted unless it contains the official registered code. Registration in the following trial registers is acceptable as well: http://www.actr.org.au/

http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/

http://isrctn.org/

http://www.trialregister.nl/trialreg/index.asp

http://www.umin.ac.jp/ctr

  1. Authorship Criteria:

Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to each of the three components mentioned below:

  1. Concept and design of 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 published; and
  4. Willingness to assume responsibility of the study.

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 contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content of the manuscript. 

  1. Reprint:

No reprints are presented to authors. The Journal is open access and all authors may acquire their article full text free of charge through the web.

  1. Ethics:

The relevant Eth­ics commit­tee/ institution review boards of the respec­tive in­stitutions must approve the study. The study itself should follow the ethical standards of the Helsinki Declaration, as revised in 2013 (available at http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/).

Ensure confidentiality of subjects by desisting from mentioning participants’ names, initials or hospital numbers, especially 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 Evidence for approval by a local Ethics Committee (for both human as well as animal studies) must be supplied by the authors on demand. IJPH will not consider any paper, which is ethically unacceptable. The related items should be inserted under the ‘Materials and Methods’ section. 

Protection of Patients' Rights to Privacy

Informed consent from the participants and from the parents or legal guardians of minors should be taken and stated in the study under the ‘Materials and Methods’ section.

Authors should remove patients' names from figures. Any data leading to direct recognize of the patient, strictly should be omitted. 

Misconducts

IJPH is a member of COPE and follows its Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. Plagiarism of text from a previously published manuscript by the same or another author is a serious publication offence. Small amounts of text may be used, but only where the source of the material quoted is clearly acknowledged and the text is inserted in quotation mark. If there is an allegation of plagiarism, scientific misconduct or fraud, IJPH will follow the recommendations of the COPE and ICMJE. The Journal reserves the right to report the allegations to the author’s institution or any other agency.

Conflicts of interest

Submitting a manu­script must be accompanied with a statement from the authors dis­closing financial and personnel rela­tionship that might bias their work, if any. Besides, they are requested to evi­dent whether impending conflicts do or do not exist. A sepa­rate page should cover this proc­lamation and if there are further de­tails, could be mentioned in covering letter. If an organiza­tion encompasses any financial in­terest in the outcome of the study, the authors are ap­pealed to provide a declaration that have full access to all the data in the study and take complete re­sponsi­bil­ity for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. 

  1. Peer review process:

IJPH is a peer-reviewed journal. All manu­scripts will be acknowledged upon pre­senting to the Jour­nal office, if all stated requirements are met. According to the policy of peer review in our Journal, a large extent of manuscripts are rejected through an in-house evaluation process based on a category of criteria including over flow of manuscripts, out of scope cases, poor outcome, local studies, clinical contents etc. This process takes no more than two weeks and the author(s) will be informed of the primary decision. The first stage passed manu­scripts are sent to two or three re­view­ers. The whole re­view proc­ess depends on re­ceiv­ing referees' comments and revising the manu­scripts based on these comments to the author. On receipt of the re­vised article from the au­thor, and after fi­nal ap­proving by refe­rees, the letter of ac­cep­tance is issued to the corresponding author only. Due to plenty of papers waiting for publishing, the article takes more than one year for publication. Authors have the right to communicate to the editor if they do not wish their manu­script to be reviewed by a par­ticular reviewer be­cause of potential con­flicts of inter­est. The author can also suggest the name of possible competent reviewers but it is up to the editor to accept it. No article is rejected unless nega­tive comments are re­ceived from at least two re­viewers.

To assist the speed of peer review process, authors are requested to introduce four well-known experts with their contact details, but the Editor-in-Chief would be emancipated finally.

The revised version of the manuscript should be included with reply to referees’ comments separately article to article. In addition, the changes should be marked as underlined or colored text in the article.

  1. Proofs:

Authors are sent galley proofs for checking the production after acceptance of the article. Proofs are sent by e-mail as Word files and considering that the Journal is published monthly, if for any reason, after 2 days, the Journal does not receive any reply, we consider the manuscript approved, and no changes will be acceptable after that. It is the authors’ responsibility to check that all the text and data as contained in the page proofs are correct and suitable for publication. We request that authors pay particular attention to author's names and affiliations, as it is essential that these details are accurate when the article is published. In this step, the authors absolutely, cannot add any authors or large sentences to the article, besides; they are not allowed to change the corresponding author.

After approving the galley proof, no changes would be accepted and the responsibility would be on author(s) side.

  1. Copyright:

Iranian Journal of Public Health allow the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions. Also the journal allow the author(s) to retain publishing rights without restrictions.

  1. Page charges: 

Dear corresponding authors

According to policy imposed by the Journal administration from 10 Nov 2015, corresponding author(s) are requested to pay the publication charge.

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.

The Editorial Board of the journal, re­serves the right to accept or reject the ar­ticle in any stage and any time or delete a part of the text, tables or figures, if neces­sary.