Instructions to Contributors
Scope and Page Limit
International Journal of Anatomical Sciences (IJAS) publishes the results of original research / observations on all aspects of bio-medical field. Papers without any relevance to structure and structural changes are not in the scope the journal. An article in IJAS can be up to 20 pages in A4 paper size including, illustrations, their legends, acknowledgements, and references.
Process of selection and peer review
Articles submitted to the journal will be subjected to review before a decision is made. Editor-in-chief will assign the reviewers for a given article. All submitted articles shall be reviewed by two independent reviewers. Editor-in-Chief of IJAS will make the final decision about the acceptance or rejection of a submitted article based on reviewers comment. Editor’s decision is final in this regard. Review process will be of anonymous double-blinded type.
Copyright
All the material published in the IJAS becomes the property of Association of Anatomists, Tamilnadu. All authors grant unconditional right to association of anatomists and IJAS to publish their work in print form and also in other forms such as electronic media including publication online through its web site. IJAS is an open access journal; articles published in IJAS can be freely downloaded and used by anyone subject to the condition that due acknowledgement to IJAS publication must be made during such usage.
If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain exclusive written permission from the copyright owners for using their work to be published in IJAS in the manner said above. Authors must take all the responsibilities with regard to obtaining permission to reproduce a copyrighted material and neither IJAS nor Association of Anatomists, Tamilnadu shall be held responsible for any copyright violations or associated legal proceedings.
Role of the funding source
It is authors’ responsibility to obtain permission from funding source to publish the work if appropriate. Authors must ensure that they duly acknowledge the funding source in the article. If the funding source played a role in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication, this must be clearly stated in the article.
Page charges
A very nominal page charge of Rs.4000 per article is levied for all authors from India. International contributors shall pay US $100 per article. Upon acceptance of an article, the corresponding author will be informed about the payment of page charges along with the acceptance letter. Efforts are being made to facilitate payment of these charges through online portal. Until such time, authors should pay through bank demand draft payable at Chennai, India. Demand draft must be account payable and drawn in favor of “Association of Anatomists, Tamil Nadu”.
Types of papers
IJAS accepts the following types of papers.
a) Research papers: These are full-length papers describing original research.
b) Case reports: These are reports of observations made in a single sample (viz. cadaver, person, bone specimen etc) which may be of interest and use to others.
c) Reviews : These are intended to either draw attention to developments in a specific area of research, to bring together observations that seem to point the field in a new direction, to give the author’s personal views on a controversial topic, or to direct soundly based criticism at some widely held dogma or widely used technique. Reviews may also provide an historical perspective on an area of biomedical research.
d) Letters to Editor: These are intended to comment / express views on articles published in the immediate previous issue of IJAS. Editor will solicit reply to these letters from the authors of the article concerned and publish the reply along with the letters to editor. Letters to editor shall not exceed two pages including references. No illustration is allowed in the letters to editor. There are no page charges for the letters to editor contributors. Acceptance is based on editorial decision.
e) Special (Invited) article: Special Issues are devoted to specific topics, preferably “emergent topics” that open new fields in neurobiological research. The Special Issues are used actively in the promotion of Science
Potential authors of reviews and special issues are invited to submit a letter of interest to the Editor indicating the topic and an outline of the contents (not exceeding 1000 words) along with a brief statement justifying the appropriateness of such review or special issue. Reviews and special issue articles will not be accepted for editorial processing unless pre-approved for submission. Page limit and page charges are applicable to reviews and special issues.
Responsibilities of authors
Conflict of interest
All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work.
Usage of animal and human in research
The authors must declare that all experiments on human subjects were conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki http://www.wma.net and that all procedures were carried out with the adequate understanding and written consent of the subjects. The authors must also certify that formal approval to conduct the experiments described has been obtained from appropriate authorities as per the law and guidelines of the region / country.
If the studies deal with animal experiments, the authors certify that they were carried out in accordance with the guidelines on animal experimentation appropriate to their place of work. In India, all animal experiments must be approved by institutional animal ethical committees formed and functioning as per the regulations of CPCSEA, Government of India. International authors must have their animal experiments approved by appropriate governing bodies and must be in compliance to the appropriate guidelines such as National Institute of Health Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (NIH Publications No. 80-23) revised 1996 or the UK Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and associated guidelines, or the European Communities Council Directive of 24 November 1986 (86/609/EEC).
The authors also certify that formal approval to conduct the experiments described has been obtained from the animal subjects review board of their institution and could be provided upon request. The authors further attest that all efforts were made to minimize the number of animals used and their suffering.
The Editorial board reserves the right to return manuscripts in which there is any question as to the appropriate and ethical use of human or animal subjects.
Submission declaration
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere including electronically in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder. In case of academic theses submitted to academic institutions, authors must have obtained necessary permission from the concerned authorities to publish the same. All authors must have materially participated in the research and/or article preparation. The statement that all authors have approved the final article should be true. The corresponding author should sign a declaration to this effect before the article is published.
Submission
Submission to IJAS must be through email. No other forms of submission are accepted.
Submission address
Please submit your article by email to the address [email protected]. In case of difficulty to submit due to large file size or others, authors may send the files in a CD through courier/postal mail with an intimation to editorial office through email.
How to Prepare an Article for Submission
1. Articles must be in English (British / American) and typed on A4 size portrait orientation in single space.
2. Files must be in .doc / .docx / .rtf / open office format only. PDF files are not accepted.
3. The text should be in single-column format. Keep the layout of the text as simple as possible. Do not use the wordprocessor’s options to justify text or to hyphenate words. However, do use bold face, italics, subscripts, superscripts etc.
4. Do not embed photos in the text but supply them as separate files.
5. Photos / figures must be in .tif or .jpg format with good resolution of minimum 300 dpi.
6. Labeling on illustrations must be made using photo editing software. No hand written labels on the specimens allowed.
7. Include two sets of photos one with labels and another identical one without labels.
8. Graphs must be supplied separate as excel files with the final data used for creating the graphs.
9. Tables must be created in the word processor itself and should not be inserted as figures by creating them elsewhere.
10. Do not use space bar to align your text. Minimize the use of tabs and other indentation formatting.
11. Use auto text wrapping feature of the word processor in paragraphs and do not press <ENTER> key at the end of each line in a paragraph.
12. Do not capitalize letters unnecessarily in the text.
13. To avoid unnecessary errors you are strongly advised to use the “spell-check” and “grammar-check” functions of your word processor. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to ensure that the manuscript is written in a style that is grammatically correct and free of spelling or other typographical errors.
14. The Editorial Office reserves the right to revise the wording of manuscripts accepted for publication in the journal.
Structure of an article
1. Please refer a published article for structuring an article.
2. Each article must begin by a title page.
3. Title page must contain the title in sentence case (not in uppercase), a running title of not more than 50 characters, name of the authors with first / given name of the author followed by initials / first letter of the family name / surname.
4. Authors list must be followed by affiliation. If authors are having different affiliations, mark author and appropriate affiliation using suitable superscripted letters as a, b, c and so on. In affiliations avoid abbreviations or acronyms. Affiliations must be full postal addresses with postal index numbers. Generally they include department name, institution name, affiliating university name, street address, city, state and country.
5. A list of keywords to be given after affiliations.
6. An abstract not more than 350 words to be given.
7. Research papers have an introduction (but the word introduction to be omitted), Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and conclusion. Case reports have introduction, case report, discussion and conclusion.
8. Acknowledgements if any can be given after text.
9. In the text, references should be quoted as the name of the first author and year in chronological order. Multiple authors are indicated by “et al.” (and “et al.” being in italics font), except when there are only two authors, in which case both names are written. For example, The pattern of the pathology instead represents a synaptically connected network of neurons (Braak and Braak, 1991; Morris, 1997). This hypothesis was recently proposed by Nagy et al. (1997).
10. List of references must be given in the ascending alphabetical order of author names. The reference list should be on a separate page at the end of the manuscript, in alphabetical order and arranged as follows: authors’ names and initials, year, title of the article, abbreviated title of the journal, volume, first and last page numbers. Journal titles should be abbreviated according to the rules adopted in the fourth edition of the World List of Scientific Periodicals (Butterworths, 1965). Note that first and last pages are given in full. and following examples must be followed. Articles with references cited in inconsistent manner will be returned to authors for correction.
11. Journal abbreviations source
Journal names should be abbreviated according to
Index Medicus journal abbreviations: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/lji.html;
List of serial title word abbreviations: http://www.issn.org/2-22661-LTWA-online.php;
CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service): http://www.cas.org/sent.html.
12. Proofs
One set of page proofs (as PDF files) will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author. Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article will not be considered at this stage. Proofreading is solely your responsibility. Note that IJAS will proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.
13. Offprints
Since the IJAS is an open-access journal, no paper offprints will be supplied to authors. However, authors wishing to get hard copy of the journal issue in which their article appear can request for the same to the editor by paying a charge as fixed by the editorial from time to time. Currently, the rate of one single issue of the journal is Rs.1000. Anyone can freely download the articles in PDF format from the journal web site.