Articles submitted to the Indian Journal of Health Sciences and Biomedical Research KLEU must be original and not previously published or forthcoming in any archival journal or book, whether in print or electronic format. It is important to note that publication in a working-paper series does not constitute prior publication.
By submitting material to the journal, authors affirm that:
- The material is not currently under review by another journal (electronic or print).
- They will not submit the material to another journal (electronic or print) until the editorial decision process at Indian Journal of Health Sciences and Biomedical Research KLEU is complete.
Following publication, authors retain the right to share pre-print or post-print versions of their articles online. These may be posted on personal, departmental, or institutional repository pages. For any concerns or clarifications regarding the submission terms, authors are encouraged to contact the editorial team.
Preparation of ManuscriptsManuscripts must be prepared in accordance with "Uniform requirements for Manuscripts submitted to Biomedical Journals" developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (October 2008). The uniform requirements and specific requirement of Indian Journal of Health Sciences and Biomedical Research KLEU are summarized below. Before submitting a manuscript, contributors are requested to check for the latest instructions available.
Indian Journal of Health Sciences and Biomedical Research KLEU accepts manuscripts written in American English.
Copies of any permission(s)It is the responsibility of authors/ contributors to obtain permissions for reproducing any copyrighted material. A copy of the permission obtained must accompany the manuscript. Copies of any and all published articles or other manuscripts in preparation or submitted elsewhere that are related to the manuscript must also accompany the manuscript.
Manuscript Submission
Types of Manuscripts
Original articles:These include randomized controlled trials, intervention studies, studies of screening and diagnostic test, outcome studies, cost effectiveness analyses, case-control series, and surveys with high response rate. The text of original articles amounting to up to 3000 words (excluding Abstract, references and Tables) should be divided into sections with the headings Abstract, Key-words, Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, Discussion, References, Tables and Figure legends.
Introduction: State the purpose and summarize the rationale for the study or observation.
Material and Methods: It should include and describe the following aspects:
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 https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/).
Ethics committee approval: For prospective studies involving human participants, authors are expected to mention about approval of (regional/ national/ institutional or independent Ethics Committee or Review Board. Evidence for approval by a local Ethics Committee (for both human as well as animal studies) must be supplied by the authors on demand.
Informed Consent: 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.
Patient confidentiality: Ensure confidentiality of subjects by desisting from mentioning participants' names, initials or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. When 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 of laboratory animals was followed.
Animal Rights Policy: Animal experimental procedures should be as humane as possible and the details of anesthetics and analgesics used should be clearly stated. The ethical standards of experiments must be in accordance with the guidelines provided by the CPCSEA (https://ccsea.gov.in/Auth/index.aspx) and World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki on Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Humans for studies involving experimental animals and human beings, respectively). 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.
Plagiarism Policy: All manuscripts submitted to the journal go through a mandatory plagiarism check by the editorial team. The journal accepts the manuscript for further processing only if, the Similarity Index is less than 10%.
Data Availability statement: All authors are expected to provide a declaration regarding the originality of the data associated with their manuscript and shall provide the same if asked for.
Funding Acknowledgement: All authors are expected to provide a declaration regarding the funding related to their study.
Conflict of Interest: 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.
Study design: Selection and Description of Participants: Describe your selection of the observational or experimental participants (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) clearly, including eligibility and exclusion criteria and a description of the source population.
Technical information: Identify the methods, apparatus (give the manufacturer's name and address in parentheses), and procedures in sufficient detail to allow other workers to reproduce the results. Give references to established methods, including statistical methods (see below); provide references and brief descriptions for methods that have been published but are not well known; describe new or substantially modified methods, give reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations. Identify precisely all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration.
Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol, assignment of interventions (methods of randomization, concealment of allocation to treatment groups), and the method of masking (blinding), based on the CONSORT Statement (http://www.consort-statement.org).
Reporting Guidelines for Specific Study Designs
| Guideline | Type of Study | Source |
| STROBE | Observational studies including cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies | https://www.strobe-statement.org/index.php?id=available-checklists |
| CONSORT | Randomized controlled trials | //www.consort-statement.org |
| SQUIRE | Quality improvement projects | //squire-statement.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&PageID=471 |
| PRISMA | Systematic reviews and meta-analyses | //www.prisma-statement.org |
| STARD | Studies of diagnostic accuracy | //pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/radiol.2015151516 |
| CARE | Case Reports | //www.care-statement.org/checklist |
| AGREE | Clinical Practice Guidelines | //www.agreetrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/AGREE-Reporting-Checklist-2016.pdf |
The authors are required to use the downloadable word document templates provided at the end of this page to prepare the manuscripts. The reporting guidelines checklist is provided in these templates which must be duly followed. The authors can also choose the reporting guidelines for the specific study design from the web links provided in the table below and upload it along with the manuscript. Manuscripts with the incomplete checklist will be sent back to the authors.
The reporting guidelines for other type of studies can be found at https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/.
Statistics: Whenever possible quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). Authors should report losses to observation (such as, dropouts from a clinical trial). When data are summarized in the Results section, specify the statistical methods used to analyze them. Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as 'random' (which implies a randomizing device), 'normal', 'significant', 'correlations', and 'sample'. Define statistical terms, abbreviations, and most symbols. Specify the computer software used. Use upper italics (P 0.048). For all P values include the exact value and not less than 0.05 or 0.001. Mean differences in continuous variables, proportions in categorical variables and relative risks including odds ratios and hazard ratios should be accompanied by their confidence intervals.
Results: Present your results in a logical sequence in the text, tables, and illustrations, giving the main or most important findings first. Do not repeat in the text all the data in the tables or illustrations; emphasize or summarize only important observations. Extra- or supplementary materials and technical detail can be placed in an appendix where it will be accessible but will not interrupt the flow of the text; alternatively, it can be published only in the electronic version of the journal.
When data are summarized in the Results section, give numeric results not only as derivatives (for example, percentages) but also as the absolute numbers from which the derivatives were calculated, and specify the statistical methods used to analyze them. Restrict tables and figures to those needed to explain the argument of the paper and to assess its support. Use graphs as an alternative to tables with many entries; do not duplicate data in graphs and tables. Where scientifically appropriate, analyses of the data by variables such as age and sex should be included.
Discussion: Include summary of key findings (primary outcome measures, secondary outcome measures, results as they relate to a prior hypothesis); Strengths and limitations of the study (study question, study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation); Interpretation and implications in the context of the totality of evidence (is there a systematic review to refer to, if not, could one be reasonably done here and now?, what this study adds to the available evidence, effects on patient care and health policy, possible mechanisms); Controversies raised by this study; and Future research directions (for this particular research collaboration, underlying mechanisms, clinical research).
Do not repeat in detail data or other material given in the Introduction or the Results section. In particular, contributors should avoid making statements on economic benefits and costs unless their manuscript includes economic data and analyses. Avoid claiming priority and alluding to work that has not been completed. New hypotheses may be stated if needed, however they should be clearly labeled as such. About 30 references can be included. These articles generally should not have more than six authors.
Review Articles: It is expected that these articles would be written by individuals who have done substantial work on the subject or are considered experts in the field. A short summary of the work done by the contributor(s) in the field of review should accompany the manuscript.The prescribed word count is up to 3000 words excluding tables, references and abstract. The manuscript may have about 90 references. The manuscript should have an unstructured Abstract (250 words) representing an accurate summary of the article. The section titles would depend upon the topic reviewed. Authors submitting review article should include a section describing the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting, and synthesizing data. These methods should also be summarized in the abstract.
The journal expects the contributors to give post-publication updates on the subject of review. The update should be brief, covering the advances in the field after the publication of the article and should be sent as a letter to editor, as and when major development occurs in the field.
Case reports:New, interesting and rare cases can be reported. They should be unique, describing a great diagnostic or therapeutic challenge and providing a learning point for the readers. Cases with clinical significance or implications will be given priority. These communications could be of up to 1000 words (excluding Abstract and references) and should have the following headings: Abstract (unstructured), Key-words, Introduction, Case report, Discussion, Reference, Tables and Legends in that order.
The manuscript could be of up to 1000 words (excluding references and abstract) and could be supported with up to 10 references. Case Reports could be authored by up to four authors.
Letter to the Editor:These should be short and decisive observations. They should preferably be related to articles previously published in the Journal or views expressed in the journal. They should not be preliminary observations that need a later paper for validation. The letter could have up to 500 words and 5 references. It could be generally authored by not more than four authors.
Other:Editorial, Guest Editorial, Commentary and Opinion are solicited by the editorial board.
References
- References should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text (not in alphabetic order). Identify references in text, tables, and legends by Arabic numerals in superscript with square bracket after the punctuation marks. References cited only in tables or figure legends should be numbered in accordance with the sequence established by the first identification in the text of the particular table or figure.
- Use the style of the examples below, which are based on the formats used by the NLM in Index Medicus. The titles of journals should be abbreviated according to the style used in Index Medicus. Use complete name of the journal for non-indexed journals. Avoid using abstracts as references. Information from manuscripts submitted but not accepted should be cited in the text as "unpublished observations" with written permission from the source. Avoid citing a "personal communication" unless it provides essential information not available from a public source, in which case the name of the person and date of communication should be cited in parentheses in the text.
- References should be appropriate in number and up to date. The articles should appropriately acknowledge the surrounding literature for the topic and must include recent citations indicating a review of the current literature . The commonly cited types of references are shown here, for other types of references such as newspaper items please refer to ICMJE Guidelines (http://www.icmje.org/or http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html
- Standard journal article (for up to six authors): Parija S C, Ravinder PT, Shariff M. Detection of hydatid antigen in the fluid samples from hydatid cysts by co-agglutination. Trans. R.Soc. Trop. Med. Hyg.1996; 90:255–256.
- Standard journal article (for more than six authors): List the first six contributors followed by et al. Roddy P, Goiri J, Flevaud L, Palma PP, Morote S, Lima N. et al., Field Evaluation of a Rapid Immunochromatographic Assay for Detection of Trypanosoma cruzi Infection by Use of Whole Blood. J. Clin. Microbiol. 2008; 46: 2022-2027.
- Volume with supplement: Otranto D, Capelli G, Genchi C: Changing distribution patterns of canine vector borne diseases in Italy: leishmaniosis vs. dirofilariosis.Parasites & Vectors 2009; Suppl 1:S2.
- Personal author(s): Parija SC. Textbook of Medical Parasitology. 3rd ed. All India Publishers and Distributors. 2008.
- Editor(s), compiler(s) as author: Garcia LS, Filarial Nematodes In: Garcia LS (editor) Diagnostic Medical Parasitology ASM press Washington DC 2007: pp 319-356.
- Chapter in a book: Nesheim M C. Ascariasis and human nutrition. In Ascariasis and its prevention and control, D. W. T. Crompton, M. C. Nesbemi, and Z. S. Pawlowski (eds.). Taylor and Francis,London, U.K.1989, pp. 87–100.
- Tables should be self-explanatory and should not duplicate textual material.
- Tables with more than 10 columns and 25 rows are not acceptable.
- Number tables, in Arabic numerals, consecutively in the order of their first citation in the text and supply a brief title for each.
- Place explanatory matter in footnotes, not in the heading.
- Explain in footnotes all non-standard abbreviations that are used in each table.
- Obtain permission for all fully borrowed, adapted, and modified tables and provide a credit line in the footnote.
- For footnotes use the following symbols, in this sequence: *, †, ‡, §, ||,¶ , **, ††, ‡‡
- Tables with their legends should be provided at the end of the text after the references. The tables along with their number should be cited at the relevant place in the text.
- Upload the images in JPEG format. The file size should be within 1024 kb in size while uploading.
- Figures should be numbered consecutively according to the order in which they have been first cited in the text.
- Labels, numbers, and symbols should be clear and of uniform size. The lettering for figures should be large enough to be legible after reduction to fit the width of a printed column.
- Symbols, arrows, or letters used in photomicrographs should contrast with the background and should be marked neatly with transfer type or by tissue overlay and not by pen.
- Titles and detailed explanations belong in the legends for illustrations not on the illustrations themselves.
- When graphs, scatter-grams or histograms are submitted the numerical data on which they are based should also be supplied.
- The photographs and figures should be trimmed to remove all the unwanted areas.
- If photographs of individuals are used, their pictures must be accompanied by written permission to use the photograph.
- If a figure has been published elsewhere, acknowledge the original source and submit written permission from the copyright holder to reproduce the material. A credit line should appear in the legend for such figures.
- Legends for illustrations: Type or print out legends (maximum 40 words, excluding the credit line) for illustrations using double spacing, with Arabic numerals corresponding to the illustrations. When symbols, arrows, numbers, or letters are used to identify parts of the illustrations, identify and explain each one in the legend. Explain the internal scale (magnification) and identify the method of staining in photomicrographs.
- Final figures for print production: Send sharp, glossy, un-mounted, color photographic prints, with height of 4 inches and width of 6 inches at the time of submitting the revised manuscript. Print outs of digital photographs are not acceptable. If digital images are the only source of images, ensure that the image has minimum resolution of 300 dpi or 1800 x 1600 pixels in TIFF format. Send the images on a CD. Each figure should have a label pasted (avoid use of liquid gum for pasting) on its back indicating the number of the figure, the running title, top of the figure and the legends of the figure. Do not write the contributor/s' name/s. Do not write on the back of figures, scratch, or mark them by using paper clips.
- The Journal reserves the right to crop, rotate, reduce, or enlarge the photographs to an acceptable size.
Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian, wherever applicable) gives informed consent for publication. Authors should remove patients' names from figures unless they have obtained informed consent from the patients. The journal abides by ICMJE guidelines:
- Authors, not the journals nor the publisher, need to obtain the patient consent form before the publication and have the form properly archived. The consent forms are not to be uploaded with the cover letter or sent through email to editorial or publisher offices.
- If the manuscript contains patient images that preclude anonymity, or a description that has obvious indication to the identity of the patient, a statement about obtaining informed patient consent should be indicated in the manuscript.
The revised version of the manuscript should be submitted online in a manner similar to that used for submission of the manuscript for the first time. However, there is no need to submit the “First Page" or “Covering Letter" file while submitting a revised version. When submitting a revised manuscript, contributors are requested to include, the 'referees' remarks along with point to point clarification at the beginning in the revised file itself. In addition, they are expected to mark the changes as underlined or colored text in the article.
Reprints and proofsJournal provides no free printed reprints. Authors can purchase reprints, payment for which should be done at the time of submitting the proofs.
Publication scheduleThe journal publishes articles on its website immediately on acceptance and follows a 'continuous publication' schedule.
Manuscript submission, processing and publication chargesThe journal charges USD$ as Article Processing Charges.
CopyrightsThe entire contents of the Indian Journal of Health Sciences and Biomedical Research KLEU are protected under Indian and international copyrights. The Journal, however, grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable non-commercial purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship and ownership of the rights. The journal also grants the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal non-commercial use under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 Unported License.
Checklist
Covering letter- Signed by all contributors
- Previous publication / presentations mentioned
- Source of funding mentioned
- Conflicts of interest disclosed
- Last name and given name provided along with Middle name initials (where applicable)
- Author for correspondence, with e-mail address provided
- Number of contributors restricted as per the instructions
- Identity not revealed in paper except title page (e.g. name of the institute in Methods, citing previous study as 'our study', names on figure labels, name of institute in photographs, etc.)
- Double spacing
- Margins 2.5 cm from all four sides
- Page numbers included at bottom
- Title page contains all the desired information
- Running title provided (not more than 50 characters)
- Abstract page contains the full title of the manuscript
- Abstract provided (structured abstract of 250 words for original articles, unstructured abstracts of about 150 words for all other manuscripts excluding letters to the Editor)
- Key words provided (three or more)
- Introduction of 75-100 words
- Headings in title case (not ALL CAPITALS)
- The references cited in the text should be after punctuation marks, in superscript with square bracket.
- References according to the journal's instructions, punctuation marks checked
- Send the article file without 'Track Changes'
- Uniformly American English
- Write the full term for each abbreviation at its first use in the title, abstract, keywords and text separately unless it is a standard unit of measure. Numerals from 1 to 10 spelt out
- Numerals at the beginning of the sentence spelt out
- Check the manuscript for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors
- If a brand name is cited, supply the manufacturer's name and address (city and state/country).
- Species names should be in italics
- No repetition of data in tables and graphs and in text
- Actual numbers from which graphs drawn, provided
- Figures necessary and of good quality (colour)
- Table and figure numbers in Arabic letters (not Roman)
- Labels pasted on back of the photographs (no names written)
- Figure legends provided (not more than 40 words)
- Patients' privacy maintained (if not permission taken)
- Credit note for borrowed figures/tables provided
- Write the full term for each abbreviation used in the table as a footnote