Journal of Anesthesia and Perioperative Medicine Editorial Policies


Table of Contents

Peer Review Process
Who Is An Author?
Conflict of Interest
Prior Publications, Presentations at Meetings, Embargo, and Advertising Policy
Statistics, Figures, and Reporting Guidelines
Protection of Research Participants
Data Sharing Policy
Corrections, Expressions of Concern, and Retractions
EBC Open Access Policy


Peer Review Process

Journal of Anesthesia and Perioperative Medicine (JAPM) applies a highly rigorous peer review process to assess manuscripts for scientific accuracy, novelty, and significance, because we agree unbiased, independent, critical assessment is vitalĀ for all scholarly work.

JAPM takes blind peer review process, every manuscript should be peer reviewed by at least three independent experts. Usually, at submission your manuscript will be assigned to the JAPM Editorial Board members if they are in the field relevant to your research. If the JAPM Editorial Board members lack sufficient expertise, the editors will invite experts outside the Editorial Board to review your manuscript. The editors will make a final decision (Reject, Major Revision, Minor Revision, Accept) by considering reviewers' comments and the suitability of the manuscript for the journal.

The JAPM peer review and editorial process is applied to all article types, including Original Article, Systematic Review and Meta-analysis, Clinical Case, Review Article, Study Protocol, Medical Image, Opinion, Editorial, and Correspondence (please see JAPM Manuscript Types and Instructions). Both clinical and basic articles will also be subject to statistical review, when appropriate.


Who Is An Author?

Authors of JAPM should meet the criteria of authorship recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), specifically as quoted below,

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
AND drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
AND final approval of the version to be published;
AND 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.

The corresponding author who takes responsibility for communication with JAPM during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process should have obtained permission from all authors for the submission of each version of the paper and for any authorship changes. All authors should be indicated on the Title Page (please see Prepare Manuscript for JAPM).

Other contributors who have participated in the process of generation of the manuscript but who don't meet the above criteria should be listed in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript.

By the way, JAPM needs every author's ORCID number (please see Create your ORCID iD).


Conflict of Interest

Every author of manuscripts submitted to JAPM is required to report affiliations, funding sources, and competing interests that might be perceived as sources of bias related to the research or presented content.

JAPM requires declarations of the following information,

Institutional Affiliations
Every author should include their academic, corporate, government, industry, or other relevant institutional affiliations on the Title Page (please see Prepare Manuscript for JAPM) at submission.

Funding and Contributions
All authors should disclose any research funders, funding and financial contributions, non-monetary contributions, for example goods or services, to their work being reported. This information should be listed in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript, and include the name of granting agencies, grant numbers, and a description of each funder's role.

Competing Interests
All authors should declare any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of financial conflicts include paid employment or consultancy, stock ownership, patent applications, personal relationships with relevant individuals, and membership of an advisory board. If there are no conflicts of interest, authors should state that. This declaration should be listed in the Acknowledgments of the manuscript.

The editors who seek reviewers for JAPM should consider those who don't have conflicts of interest with the authors and the manuscripts they read. And all reviewers are required to declare any conflicts when evaluating the manuscripts. Editors of JAPM shouldn't have any financial or management interest with authors, reviewers, and any related biomedical institutions and companies.


Prior Publications, Presentations at Meetings, Embargo, and Advertising Policy

JAPM doesn't consider any manuscript that has been published or is under consideration for publication elsewhere. JAPM doesn't include dissertations or theses as prior publications, and we are pleased to publish them in JAPM. JAPM supports posting of research papers on preprint servers such as arXiv.org, bioRxiv.org, ChemRxiv.org, medRxiv.org. Distribution on the internet in other ways may be considered as prior publication.

JAPM encourages presentation of original results prior to publication at scientific meetings, this information should be listed in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript.

Submitted and accepted papers should not be released to the press or the public before publication. JAPM provides embargoed press packages to reporters and media before the publication for some major papers. EBC Journals take the Principles Governing Advertising in Publications of the American Medical Association as the Journal's advertising policies.


Statistics, Figures, and Reporting Guidelines

Statistical analyses should be done on all available data and not just on data from some representative sets. Statistical analyses should include the source and version of all software used, and full information on the statistical methods and measures used for each table and figure, such as a statistical test, estimates of parameters, exact sample sizes, and measures of evidence strength. The editors of JAPM may send manuscripts for statistical review.

Authors should describe and clearly indicate all modifications, selective digital adjustments, and electronic enhancements made to any digital images. Authors should also ensure that no specific feature in any image has been enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced, and make sure that any adjustments of brightness, color, or contrast don't misrepresent any features of the original image, and no image has been duplicated within the manuscript or published elsewhere. The editors of JAPM may request the original image metadata.

Reporting guidelines have been developed for different study designs, examples include CONSORT for randomized trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, STARD for studies of diagnostic accuracy, and CARE for case reports. JAPM asks authors to follow these guidelines because they help authors describe the study fully. Authors of review articles should describe the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting, and synthesizing data.


Protection of Research Participants

Studies should have been approved by the author's institutional review board. Authors should include a brief statement identifying the institutional or ethics committee approving the experiments or trials in the Methods section of the manuscript.

For all experiments involving human participants, authors should also include a statement confirming that written informed consent was obtained from all participants, or provide a statement why this was not necessary. All experiments should have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Helsinki Declaration. Authors should follow the ICMJE policy and deposit trial information and design at an accepted clinical trial registry before the onset of patient enrollment.

For animal studies, authors should report the species, strain, sex, and age of the animals, and indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed.


Data Sharing Policy

JAPM supports data sharing proposed by the New England Journal of Medicine and the ICMJE, but JAPM doesn't require authors providing a data sharing statement for their clinical trials. Nevertheless, JAPM has an idea that publishing clinical trial protocols is an important part of data sharing, and can help toward the goal of making data sharing a reality.


Corrections, Expressions of Concern, and Retractions

JAPM accepts corrections when they are detected after publication. For corrections that don't substantively affect any scientific results, the online version and PDF will be corrected, and this will be noted in the document. For corrections that address scientific accuracy, an independent, citable erratum that transparently explains the corrections will be published online and with the corrected PDF versions. A correction notice of the erratum will be published in the nearest issue of JAPM detailing changes from and citing the original publication.

For errors serious enough to invalidate a paper's results and conclusions, a retraction may be required. JAPM may publish an Editorial Expression of Concern relating to the questioned paper. Papers will also be retracted in case of scientific misconduct in accord with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.


EBC Open Access Policy

All the articles and works published in JAPM, an open-access journal published by Evidence Based Communications (EBC), and other EBC open-access journals are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format for any lawful purpose. To view a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Besides the EBC Open Access Policy declared on their websites, for all the print versions of articles and works published in JAPM and other EBC open-access journals, we note the policy at the bottom of the first page of each article.