Journal Polices

Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine (eISSN: 3115-7289), formerly published as "Iranian Journal of Emergency Medicine (eISSN: 2383-3645)", is an international, peer-reviewed, continuous journal dedicated to improving the quality of care and increasing the knowledge in the field of emergency medicine by publishing high quality articles concerning emergency medicine and related disciplines. The journal publishes articles on critical care, disaster and trauma management, environmental diseases, toxicology, pediatric emergency medicine, emergency medical services, emergency nursing, health policy and ethics, and other related topics. Following types of articles are supported:

• Original/Research Article
• Review Article
• Brief Report
• Case Report
• Letter to the Editor
• Photo Quiz

Publication Frequency

All accepted articles will be published continuously from the beginning of 2018 in order to increase its visibility and possibility of citation. Compared to the conventional periodical publication format, in continuous publication, articles will receive a page number and are published continuously immediately after acceptance and proof editing. Therefore, the time interval between acceptance and publication is completely eliminated.

Open Access Policy

Since making research freely available supports a greater global exchange of knowledge, "Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine" provides immediate open access to its content by receiving an article processing charge from the author(s).These fees are used for maintaining a publication infrastructure, managing the journal, and processing the manuscripts (copyediting, layout editing, XML generation, etc.).

According to Bethesda Statement, all works published in this journal are open access and freely available to anyone on the journal web site without cost under creative common license BY-NC. Based on this license, under the condition of proper citation, Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine grants to all users the following rights:

1. Free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual access to all published materials.
2. To copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work on third party repositories and social media.
3. To make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any non-commercial purpose.

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...

Editorial Independence

The editor in chief makes the final decision regarding publication or rejection of the submitted articles without interference of its owner (Emergency Medicine Department of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences) or economic interests.

Plagiarism Policy

When an author tries to present the work of someone else as his or her own, it is called plagiarism. In addition, when an author uses a considerable portion of his or her own previously published work in a new one without properly citing the reference, it is called a duplicate publication sometimes also referred to as self-plagiarism. This may range from publishing the same article in another journal to 'salami-slicing', which is data segmentation, to adding little new data to the previous article.

The editorial team/reviewers of "Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine" will check the submitted manuscripts for plagiarism twice (once after submission and once before publication) using available plagiarism detection software such as iThenticate. If suspected plagiarism is found in an article either before (by reviewers or editorial team) or after (by readers) publication, Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine will act according to COPE’s code of conduct and flowcharts. 

Authorship Conflicts

Based on the ICMJE recommendations "all those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged".

Any change in authorship (i.e. order, addition, and deletion of authors) after initial submission must be approved by all authors via written confirmation, in line with COPE guidelines. It is the corresponding authors' responsibility to ensure that all authors confirm they agree with the proposed changes. If there is disagreement amongst the authors concerning authorship and a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached, the authors must contact their institution(s) for a resolution. It is not the journal editor's responsibility to resolve authorship disputes. Any requests for a change in authorship after publication of an article will be evaluated and can only be amended via publication of an Erratum.

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.

Malpractice Statements

Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine conforms to the international regulations against scientific misconduct including fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and etc. Any cases of suspected misconduct (such as redundant publication) will be assessed during the peer-review and publication process based on COPE guidelines. In addition, all pre or post-publication issues will be managed based on COPE's code of conduct and flowcharts.

Copyright Notice

Based on the obtained author agreement upon submission, "Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine" is the copyright owner of the published material. However, according to Bethesda Statement, all works published in this journal are open access and freely available to anyone on the journal web site without cost under creative common license BY-NC. Based on this license, under the condition of proper citation, Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine grants to all users the following rights:

1. Free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual access to all published materials.
2. To copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work on third party repositories and social media.
3. To make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any non-commercial purpose.

Artificial Intelligence & Authorship

With advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and development of tools that can perform human-like tasks such as summarizing articles, writing essays, creating images, and preparing presentation drafts, authors of scholarly articles may find these tools helpful and plan to use them for preparing their manuscripts. However, they should note that these tools have important limitations. They may use phrases from previously distributed material verbatim and/or without proper referencing, thus generating plagiarized material. They may also make statements that are not true or dismiss views opposing the one expressed in the output.

Based on the WAME recommendations, AI tools cannot be listed as authors since they do not meet the authorship criteria as they cannot take responsibility for the integrity of the work, approve the manuscript's final version, understand conflict of interest, or hold copyright. Yet, authors who have used these tools for preparing their manuscript should clearly introduce the tool they have used and how they have used it in the manuscript. The authors should note that they are responsible for the content of their manuscript, including the parts produced by the AI tools. They should make sure that publication ethics are observed throughout the manuscript.

Retraction Considerations

Articles may be flawed due to honest errors, naïve mistakes, or research misconduct. If errors are serious enough to invalidate a paper's results and conclusions the paper should be retracted in order to correct the literature. Redundant publication, plagiarism, peer review manipulation, reuse of material or data without authorization, copyright infringement or some other legal issue (like libel, privacy, illegality), unethical research, and/or a failure to disclose a major competing interest that would have unduly influenced interpretations or recommendations may warrant retractions.

Article’s author(s), an institution, readers, or the editor may ask for retractions. However, authorship disputes without doubts regarding validity and reliability of the data should not lead to retraction. Authors of the retraction should ideally be the same as the retracted article but other responsible persons or the editor may also be authors of the retraction. The reasons for the retraction, the person asking for retraction, and possibly how the journal found out about it would be mentioned in the retraction notice (names would be mentioned only with permission). It would also completely cite the article. Both retractions and all forms of the retracted articles would be clearly labelled and would also be linked in both directions. The retraction would appear on all online searches for the retracted publication.

Publications would be retracted as soon as possible after the editor is convinced that retraction is required; however, when there isn’t enough evidence, yet, the editor could consider publishing an expression of concern.

In rare cases when the article is clearly defamatory, violates personal privacy, is the subject of a court order, or might pose a serious health risk to the general public the article would be removed, but the metadata (title and authors) would remain and the retraction notice would clearly state why the full article has been removed.

An author may republish some of the work if not all of the content was found to be unreliable. Authors would notify the editors of the new journal of the prior retraction and it is likely appropriate to cite the retraction, indicating why the work was flawed and what has been corrected in the new article. Permission to republish also needs to be agreed with the copyright holder of the retracted work. ‌

In addition, if the error in the paper is judged to be unintentional, the underlying science appears valid, and the changed version of the paper survives further review and editorial scrutiny, then retraction with republication (or “replacement”) would be considered with an explanation. In such cases, the journal will show the extent of the changes in supplementary material or in an appendix, for complete transparency.

Article Withdrawal

Author(s) should note that they can withdraw their articles before being sent for peer review or when they are returned to them for making changes (minor or major revisions required), and not when they are under peer review. Unless that round of peer review (and not the total duration) for the article has exceeded the maximum duration of the peer review process stated on the website.

Articles can only be withdrawn before their acceptance, except in cases that contain errors or have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, articles may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like.

Articles that include errors, or are duplicates of or very similar to other published article(s) or are determined to violate the journals’ publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors, may be withdrawn.

For this purpose, a withdrawal letter must be emailed to the editorial office indicating the decision to withdraw and explaining the reason for withdrawal signed the corresponding author and the submitting individuals’ signature.

Preprints Policy

A preprint is a paper that is made available publicly via a community preprint server prior to (or simultaneous with) submission to a journal. Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine adhere to the principles of COPE’s recommendations regarding best practices for preprints.

Journal of Practical Emergency Medicine will consider for review each article which previously or simultaneously is available as preprints. Authors are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article. Authors may also post the final published version of the article immediately after publication.

Authors should not assign copyright during the preprint process; authors should retain copyright in their work when posting to a preprint server.

Preferably, authors should only grant “no re-use” licenses to their preprints. However, we will consider for publication submissions that have previously been assigned CC-BY (-NC/-NC-ND) as preprints.

We encourage researchers and academics who reference preprints (like other peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources) to continue to cite these sources accurately as shown below:

• Chele D, Sirbu CA, Mitrică M, Toma M, Vasiliu O, Sirbu AM, et al.. Metformin’s Effects on Cognitive Function from Biovariance Perspective. Preprint at https://www.preprints.org/frontend/manuscript/69089ad0230411fc3bf5c9e423d0b936/download_pub  (2024).

If a preprint is assigned a DOI, we will assign a new DOI to the accepted article and can optionally link to the preprint.

Peer Review Policy

Submissions deemed suitable by the editors will be refereed by two reviewers within a maximum of six weeks, based on research reporting guidelines specified for each type of article (introduced in the manuscript preparation section). Reviewers' comments are then sent to the authors so that they can address them. All authors are asked to send their revised manuscripts or response to the comments within two weeks. Then the editor-in-chief will decide if the article needs to undergo further peer review (by the same reviewer or another reviewer, who can be a member of the editorial board) or it can be accepted for publication.

Reviewers' and authors' identities are kept confidential. The existence of a submitted manuscript is not revealed to anyone other than the reviewers and editorial staff. In case a member of the editorial board or staff submits a manuscript to the journal, it is dealt with in the same manner mentioned and the editor who submitted the manuscript does not have a say in the peer review process or the final decision made.

To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission, every effort will make to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other (Double-blind peer review).