Editorial Policies
MEJDD follows the "Editorial Policies" adopted by scholarly journals published by Iranian Association of Gastroenterology and Hepatology & Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. MEJDD Editors follows "the international standards for editors" recommended by COPE. Authorship Due to uniform requirements for manuscript submitted to medical journals "an author" is generally considered to be someone who meets the conditions 1, 2, and 3." 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, and 3) final approval of the version to be published." Authors should meet "the international standards for authors" recommended by COPE. Acknowledgements
All sources of funding and support, and substantive contributions of individuals, should be noted in the acknowledgments, positioned before the conflict of interest statement.
Authorship Changes
Any change in authorship (i.e., order, addition, and deletion of authors) after initial submission must be approved by all authors. Authors should determine the order of authorship among themselves. In addition, any alterations must be clarified to the Editor/Editor-in-chief.
Ethical approval of research/Publication Ethics
Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and aims to adhere to its Best Practice Guidelines.
We strongly consider allegations of publication misconduct, both before and after publication, and we reserve the right to contact authors' institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if needed. If we find conclusive evidence of misconduct, we will take steps to correct the scientific record, which may include supplying a correction or retraction.
Authors are expected to be aware of publication ethics, specifically with regard to authorship, dual submission, plagiarism, figure manipulation, competing interests, and compliance with standards of research ethics. In cases of suspected misconduct, we will follow COPE standards and practices and may seek advice from the COPE forum if needed.
Statement of Ethics Approval
We require every research article submitted to include a statement that the study obtained ethics approval (or a statement that it was not required and why), including the name of the ethics committee(s) or institutional review board(s), the number/ID of the approval(s), and a statement that participants gave informed consent before taking part. Even when a study has been approved by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, editors may ask authors for more detailed information about the ethics of the work. Conflict of Interest All authors must make a formal statement indicating any potential conflict of interest that might constitute an embarrassment to any of the authors if it were not to be declared and were to emerge after publication. Such conflicts might include, but are not limited to, shareholding in or receipt of a grant or consultancy fee from a company whose product features in the submitted manuscript or which manufactures a competing product. The statement should be positioned before the list of references. If there are no conflicts of interest, please insert the wording 'Conflict of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this work.
Patient consent and confidentiality
Any article that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires the patient’s explicit consent before we can publish it. We would like the patient to sign our consent form, which requires the patient to have read the article.
If consent cannot be obtained because the patient cannot be traced then publication will be possible only if the information can be sufficiently anonymized. Anonymization means that neither the patient nor anyone else could identify the patient with certainty.
If the patient is dead the authors should seek permission from a relative (as a matter of courtesy and medical ethics). If the relatives are not contactable we will balance the worthwhileness of the case, the likelihood of identification, and the likelihood of offense if identified in making a decision on whether we should publish without a relative’s consent.
Our policy on obtaining consent for publication of pictures of patients is a subset of our general policy on patient confidentiality. If there is any chance that a patient may be identified from a photograph or other image or from its legend or accompanying text we need the patient’s written consent to publication by Shiraz University of Medical Sciences and Iranian Association of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Images – such as x rays, laparoscopic images, ultrasound images, pathology slides, or images of undistinctive parts of the body – may be used without consent so long as they are anonymized by the removal of any identifying marks and are not accompanied by text that could reveal the patient’s identity through clinical or personal detail.
The key reporting guidelines are:
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs): CONSORT guidelines
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses: PRISMA guidelines and MOOSE guidelines
Observational studies in epidemiology: STROBE guidelines and MOOSE guidelines
Diagnostic accuracy studies: STARD guidelines
Quality improvement studies: SQUIRE guidelines
Clinical trial registration
Based on ICMJE recommendations, a clinical trial defines as “any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome”.
In agreement with the ICMJE, Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases will not consider reports of clinical trials unless they were registered prospectively before recruitment of any participants.
Trial Registration
As a condition of consideration for publication, journals published by Shiraz University of Medical Sciences and Iranian Association of Gastroenterology and Hepatology require registration of all trials in a public trials registry that is acceptable to the ICMJE (any registry that is a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en/index.html or in ClinicalTrials.gov, which is a data provider to the WHO ICTRP).
Plagiarism detection
Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases is powered by the iThenticate software, which is a plagiarism detector service that verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. If plagiarism is identified, we will follow COPE guidelines.
Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to: - Directly copying text from other sources
- Copying ideas, images, or data from other sources
- Reusing text from your own previous publications
- Using an idea from another source with slightly modified language
If plagiarism is detected during the peer review process, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we reserve the right to issue a correction or retract the paper, as appropriate. We reserve the right to inform authors' institutions about plagiarism detected either before or after publication.
Peer review policy
Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases reviews all manuscript submissions, internally or externally. Original research articles authored by a member of a journal’s editorial team are independently peer reviewed; an editor will have no input or influence on the peer review process or publication decision for their own article. Editorials and obituaries written by the journal’s editor do not undergo external peer review.
Peer Review Procedures
All manuscripts submitted to Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases are subject to rigorous review. This review consists of the following steps:
1. Initial submissions are reviewed by internal staff of Iranian Association of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, including ethical requirements for human and animal experimentation.
2. Submissions are then assigned to an Editor for evaluation.
3. The Associate Editor decides whether reviews from additional experts are needed to evaluate the manuscript. The majority of submissions are evaluated by two external reviewers, but it is up to the Editor to determine the number of reviews required.
4. After evaluation, the Editor chooses between the following decisions:
* Accept
* Minor Revision
* Major Revision
* Reject
5. If the decision is Minor Revision or Major Revision, authors have 14 days to resubmit the revised manuscript. Authors may contact email address if they require an extension.
6. Upon resubmission, the Editor may choose to send the manuscript back to external reviewers or may render a decision based on personal expertise.
Permissions
It is the author’s responsibility to secure all permissions prior to publication.
Material from other sources
Any written or illustrative material that has been or will be published elsewhere must be duly acknowledged and accompanied by the written consent of the copyright holder (this may be the publisher rather than the author). This includes your own previously published material if you are not the copyright holder.
Reproducing material published by Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases
Materials published by Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases may be reproduced in full or part in any medium or language only on the condition that the original material is cited properly.
Publication frequency
The publication frequency and all related information regarding the journals are listed on their website.
Fees, Copyright and Licensing Publication Fees
Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases is published quarterly. As a "Publish Free" and "Access Free" journal, Middle East Journal of Digestive Diseases follows a constructive peer-review process with free editing service to benefit the scientific community worldwide. Therefore, there are no publication fees for the authors at the moment.
Open Access Agreement
Upon submitting an article, authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an open-access Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 4.0). Under the terms of this license, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their articles. However, the license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article, so long as appropriate credit is given to the authors and the source of the work. The license ensures that the article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive.
Advertising
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