Preparation of Manuscript

Submission Checklist 

Read the Aims & Scope to gain an overview and assess if your manuscript is suitable for this journal Use the Microsoft Word template to prepare your manuscript according to the ICMJE Guidelines Read the Research and Publication Ethics guidelines and ensure that they are reflected in your manuscript Make sure that issues about publication ethics, copyright, authorship, plagiarism, conflict of interest etc have been appropriately considered. Read the policy documents under "JNAH Policies" on the main page Ensure that all authors have approved the content of the submitted manuscript. Download the Author Declaration Form, get it signed from all authors (Without this document your manuscript will not be processed) An Ethical Review board approval letter is required for every original study. If an ethical review board is not present in your institute, download the Ethical Declaration Form. (Without this document your manuscript will not be processed). Click Register and log in to the OJS system as an author. Attach the Manuscript in Word format along with the authorship form and ethical approval letter.

Manuscript Submission Overview

Type of Publications:

JNAH has no restrictions on the length of manuscripts, provided that the text is concise and comprehensive. Full experimental details must be provided so that the results can be reproduced. JNAH requires that authors publish all experimental controls and make full datasets available where possible. The Manuscripts submitted to JNAH should neither be published before nor be under consideration for publication in another journal. The main article types are as follows:

Articles: Original research manuscripts. The journal considers all original research manuscripts provided that the work reports scientifically sound experiments and provides a substantial amount of new information. Authors should not unnecessarily divide their work into several related manuscripts, although Short Communications of preliminary, but significant, results will be considered. Quality and impact of the study will be considered during peer review.

Reviews: These provide concise and precise updates on the latest progress made in a given area of research. Systematic reviews should follow the HEC or PMDC guidelines. Preprints and Conference papers: JNAH previously did not accept/publish preprint and conference proceedings. However, expanded and high-quality conference papers can be considered as articles if they fulfill the following requirements: (1) the paper should be expanded to the size of a research article; (2) the conference paper should be cited and noted on the first page of the paper; (3) if the authors do not hold the copyright of the published conference paper, authors should seek the appropriate permission from the copyright holder; (4) authors are asked to disclose that it is conference paper in their cover letter and include a statement on what has been changed compared to the original conference paper. JNAH does not publish pilot studies or studies with inadequate statistical power.

Case Reports: We publish case reports and case series for conditions that are novel.

The submitting author, who is generally the corresponding author, is responsible for the manuscript during the submission and peer-review process. The submitting author must ensure that all eligible co-authors have been included in the author list and that they have all read and approved the submitted version of the manuscript. To submit your manuscript, register, and log in to the OJS. All co-authors can see the manuscript details in the submission system if they register and log in using the e-mail address provided during manuscript submission.

Manuscript Preparation

Go through articles published in JNAH and follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors guidelines regarding manuscript preparation. Click the link above and review these guidelines before submitting your manuscript.

Authors Guidelines

Journal of Nursing & Allied Health is a double-blind double peer-reviewed quarterly published journal that serves as a medium for the latest advancement of scientific knowledge in all the branches of Nursing, Allied Health Sciences and publication of scientific investigation in these fields.

Journal of Nursing & Allied Health follows the ICMJE guidelines and Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly work" in medical journals; available at: http://icmje.org/recommendations/

Authors Guidelines

Submission Process:

All manuscripts for Journal of Nursing & Allied Health should be submitted through online submission system through the journal. The author, who is generally the corresponding author, is responsible for the manuscript during the submission and peer-review process. The corresponding author must ensure that all co-authors have read and approved the submitted version of the manuscript.

Submission format according to Manuscript type
Title of the Manuscript

Title Page: The complete title of the manuscript, the name of all the authors with qualifications, the affiliated department or institution, address for correspondence with telephone numbers, cell phones, e-mail, and short running title of the article, source of funding, and total word count.

ABSTRACT:

1. All original articles must accompany a structured abstract up to 250 words. It should include Objective of the study, Methodology, Results & Conclusions. (Selection of study subjects or experimental animals; observational and analytical methods, give specific data and their statistical significance, if possible). Emphasize new and important aspects of the study or observations. This page should contain structured abstract and key words only. Abstract should reflect the content of the article accurately. 
2. Abstract for case report, short communications, clinical note, letter to the editor and narrative reviews should be non-structured up to 150 words.
3. All review articles should be preceded by a summary. Authors submitting review manuscript should include a section describing the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting and synthesizing data, data bases searched and the time period. These methods should also be summarized in the abstract.
4. Keywords: Use terms from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) list of index medicus, if suitable MeSH terms are not yet available for recently introduced terms, present terms may be used.

Introduction: This section should be written as deductive approach. This should mention the background and the rationale for the study, with reference to national, regional and international literature. It should also describe briefly the purpose of the study. It should neither review the subject extensively nor it should have data or conclusions of the study.

Methodology: This section should include the following without subheadings in an organized manner.

• Ethical review statement
• Study design and settings
• Study duration
• Sampling method and sample size calculations with reference
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria
• Details of apparatus (if applicable with manufacturer name and address) and or drugs/chemicals used. Use generic name/s of drugs/ chemicals along with dose (s) and route(s) of administration
• Statistics should clearly include the tests applied along with statistical software package used with version.

 For patients, age, sex with mean age ± standard deviation must be given. Statistical method must be mentioned and specify any general computer programme used.

Results: This section should include results explained in a logical manner through text, graphs and tables. Avoid repetitions of data shown through tables and figures in the text. Extra or supplementary materials and technical details can be placed in an appendix where it will be accessible.

Discussion: This section should present findings of the study. Significant findings should be discussed comparing with results of other published studies. Repetition of results should be avoided.  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. Strengths and limitations should be mentioned at the end of this section.

Conclusion(s): Briefly summarize the net findings of your study without over emphasizing them.  It should not include any findings / benefits not mentioned in the results. 

Acknowledgements: Names and contributions of people who do not qualify for the authorship but helped in the study may be listed in this section with their permission.

Disclosure/Conflict of Interest: Disclose if the current manuscript has been presented or published in a conference or abstract book or if it is a part of thesis/project. Any conflict of interest should be declared.  It may include honorarium, funding, credits and promotion which are not unethical but should be declared. Authors must disclose all sources of funding received along with their expenditure. If there are no funding sources, the authors should state no funding has been provided by agency in the public, commercial or non-profit sectors.

Tables and Figures: These should be included in the text as per manuscript requirement. These should be easy to interpret and not be repetitive of results/data already discussed in the text. Tables should be numbered in Roman numerals. Title should be short and explanatory and written on the top. Foot note should explain abbreviations if used. Statistical results should include standard deviation and standard error of mean. Source should be given of any data/table from published articles. Maximum Number of tables and figures for original articles should be 4, for review article should be 5, for case report should be 4, and for short communication should be 2. Refer to table number in relevant section of your manuscript.

Units of measurement: for reporting in the text they should be Conventional with System International (SI) units given in parenthesis.  The names of drugs should be written in generic terminology.

References

All references should be cited in Vancouver style and give citations in text as superscript. While citing articles use references of published articles and avoid personal communications and unpublished observations.  These references should also be marked in the text. To minimize errors author should verify references against the original documents. The References should be written in Vancouver style.

Examples

Reference from original article: Memon ZA, Shaikh AA, Qureshi SS, Mughal F, Singha SP, Qureshi MA. Histomorphometric Effects of Oral use of Tobacco in Testes of Offsprings of Swiss Albino Mice. Ann Pak inst Med Sci. 2018;14(4):256-262.

Reference from books: Kodkany BS, Derman RA. Pitfalls in assessing blood loss and decision to transfer.In:B-Lynch CB, Keith LG, Lalonde AB, Karaoshi M, editors. A text book of postpartum haemorrhage.*Chapter 4.Dumfrieshire, UK: Sapiens Publishing ; 2006.p.35-45.

Reference from website: Memon ZA, Shaikh AA, Qureshi SS, Mughal F, Singha SP, Qureshi MA. Histomorphometric Effcets of Oral use of Tobacco in Testes of Offsprings of Swiss Albino Mice.[internet]. Islamabad.SZABMU/PIMS.[2018-12-28].Available from:

Case reports 
It consist of unique cases either diagnosed or reporting of treatment, In general, all case reports include the following components: an abstract, an introduction, a case, and a discussion.

Word limits and number of references: Word limit for submission of each manuscript is as under excluding Abstract & References

Manuscript Type	Word limit	References
Original Article	3000	20-25
Review Article	4000	35-40
Case Report	2000	10
Short communication/Letter to the editor	1500	5-10

 

Research and Publication Ethics

We follow Code of Ethics and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors detailed in COPE Research Publication Ethics

Research Involving Human Subjects  

• When reporting on research that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, authors must declare that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975, revised in 2008. According to point 23 of this declaration, an approval from an ethics committee should have been obtained before undertaking the research. At a minimum, a statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be cited in the Methods Section of the article. Data relating to individual participants must be described in detail, but private information identifying participants need not be included unless the identifiable materials are of relevance to the research (for example, photographs of participants’ faces that show a particular symptom). Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.
• Example of an ethical statement: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)."
• A written informed consent for publication must be obtained from participating patients who can be identified (including by the patients themselves). Patients’ initials or other personal identifiers must not appear in an image. For manuscripts that include any case details, personal information, and/or images of patients, authors must obtain signed informed consent from patients (or their relatives/guardians) before submitting to our journal. Patient details must be anonymized as far as possible, e.g., do not mention specific age, ethnicity, or occupation where they are not relevant to the conclusions.
• You may compete the Ethical Declaration Form after consulting with your affiliated institution. Alternatively, you may provide a detailed justification of why informed consent is not necessary. For the purposes of publishing in JRMC, a consent, permission, or release form should include unlimited permission for publication in all formats (including print, electronic, and online), in sublicensed and reprinted versions (including translations and derived works), and in other works and products under open access license. To respect patients’ and any other individual’s privacy, please do not send signed forms. The journal reserves the right to ask authors to provide signed forms if necessary.

Publication Ethics Statement

The editors of this journal enforce a rigorous peer-review process together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high-quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, image manipulation, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. The editors of JNAH take such publishing ethics issues very seriously and are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero-tolerance policy. Authors wishing to publish their papers in JNAH must abide to the following:

• Any facts that might be perceived as a possible conflict of interest of the author(s) must be disclosed in the paper prior to submission.
• Authors should accurately present their research findings and include an objective discussion of the significance of their findings.
• Data and methods used in the research need to be presented in sufficient detail in the paper, so that other researchers can replicate the work.
• Simultaneous submission of manuscripts to more than one journal is not tolerated.
• Republishing content that is not novel is not tolerated (for example, an English translation of a paper that is already published in another language will not be accepted).
• If errors and inaccuracies are found by the authors after publication of their paper, they need to be promptly communicated to the editors of this journal so that appropriate actions can be taken. Please refer to our COPE retraction guidelines.
• Your manuscript should not contain any information that has already been published. If you include already published figures or images, please obtain the necessary permission from the copyright holder to publish under the CC-BY license.

 

Authorship Criteria

Having a list of all the authors makes it easy for the journal, as it tells readers who did the work and it ensures that the right people get the credit, and also take responsibility, for the research.

To ensure that the principles laid down by editors are not breached and by-lines reflect who really did the work, both editors and investigators feel that in order to avoid this misrepresentation which is a form of research misconduct, authorship in written form is necessary.

JNAH adopts the following policies regarding authorship:-

Authorship        

Authors should state their contribution to the project. They should provide a description of what each contributed, by signing & mentioning the task done on the authorship declaration form. We publish this information in print. As per ICJME guidelines, an author must have,

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published;
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

If an contributor doesn’t fulfil this criteria, he/she should not sign the authorship form as an author.

Corresponding author

The person who receives the reviewers’ comments, the proofs, etc. and whose contact details are printed on the article so that readers can request reprints or contact the research group.

Acknowledgements

We permit acknowledgement of contributions to a research project that do not merit authorship. The ICMJE guidelines state: ‘All others who contributed to the work who are not authors should be named in the Acknowledgments, and what they did should be described’. All those who are listed in this way should be aware of it.

Order of authors

The ICMJE guidelines state that the order of authorship, should be ‘a joint decision of the coauthors’. Authors should ideally make these decisions before starting to write up the project.

Number of authors

There is no limit to this but since we use the Vancouver style of referencing names of only the first six authors will be available whenever anyone cites their article.

Fill the authorship declaration form according to this policy.

Further Readings:

Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors How to handle authorship disputes: a guide for new researchers