Guide for Authors

General Manuscript Preparation

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

Azerbaijan Cardiology Journal is a scientific, open access periodical of the Azerbaijan Society of Cardiology. The journal is published in accordance with independent, unbiased, and double-blinded peer-review principles. The journal publishes 2 (two) issues per year. The publication language of the journal is English and Azerbaijani.

Azerbaijan Cardiology Journal aims to contribute to the literature by publishing manuscripts at the highest scientific level on a wide range of topics including cardiac and cardiovascular diseases. The journal publishes original clinical and experimental research articles, case reports, reviews and interesting images pertinent to cardiovascular diseases, as well as editorial comments, letters to the editor, news, guidelines, and abstracts presented at national cardiology meetings.

The scope of the journal includes but not limited to coronary artery disease, valve diseases, arrhythmias, heart failure, hypertension, congenital heart diseases, cardiovascular surgery, basic science and imaging techniques.

The target audience of the journal includes specialists, researchers and professionals who are working and interested in the field of cardiology.

EDITORIAL AND PUBLICATION PROCESS

The editorial and publication processes of the journal are shaped in accordance with the guidelines of the International Council of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the Council of Science Editors (CSE), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the European Association of Science Editors (EASE), and National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The journal conforms to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (doaj.org/bestpractice).

PEER REVIEW PROCESS

Manuscripts submitted to Azerbaijan Cardiology Journal will go through a double-blind peer-review process. Each submission except case images and editorial comments will be reviewed by at least two external, independent peer reviewers who are experts in their fields in order to ensure an unbiased evaluation process. Case images and editorial comments are evaluated by the Editorial Board of the journal. The editorial board will invite an external and independent editor to manage the evaluation processes of manuscripts submitted by editors or by the editorial board members of the journal. The Editor in Chief is the final authority in the decision-making process for all submissions.

ETHICAL GUIDELINES

An approval of research protocols by the Ethics Committee in accordance with international agreements (World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki “Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects,” amended in October 2013, www.wma.net) is required for experimental, clinical, and drug studies and for some case reports. If required, ethics committee reports, or an equivalent official document will be requested from the authors. Submissions which do not have ethical approval will be reviewed according to COPE’s Research, Audit and Service Evaluations guideline. Such manuscripts can be rejected after editorial review due to the lack of ethics committee approval.

For manuscripts concerning experimental research on humans, a statement should be included that written informed consent of patients and volunteers was obtained following a detailed explanation of the procedures that they may undergo.

It is the authors’ responsibility to protect the patients’ anonymity carefully. For photographs that may reveal the identity of the patients, signed releases of the patient or their legal representative should be enclosed, and the publication approval must be provided in the Methods section.

For studies carried out on animals, an approval research protocols by the Ethics Committee in accordance with international agreements (Guide for the care and use of laboratory animals, 8th edition, 2011" and/or “International Guiding Principles for Biomedical Research Involving Animals, 2012”) is required. Also, the measures taken to prevent pain and suffering of the animals should be stated clearly in such studies.

Information on patient consent, the name of the ethics committee, and the ethics committee approval number and date should also be stated in the Methods section of the manuscript.

PLAGIARISM AND ETHICAL MISCONDUCT

Azerbaijan Cardiology Journal is extremely sensitive about plagiarism. All submissions are screened by a similarity detection software (iThenticate by CrossCheck) at any point during the peer-review and/or production process.

When you are discussing others' (or your own) previous work, please make sure that you cite the material correctly in every instance.

Authors are strongly recommended to avoid any form plagiarism and ethical misconduct that are exemplified below.

Self-plagiarism (text-recycling): Overlapping sections or sentences with the author’s previous publications without citing them. Even if you are the author of the phrases or sentences, the text should not have unacceptable similarity with the previously published data.
Salami slicing: Using the same data of a research into several different articles. Reporting the same hypotheses, population, and methods of a study is into different papers is not acceptable.
Data Fabrication: It is the addition of data that never occurred during the gathering of data or the experiments. Results and their interpretation must be based on the complete data sets and reported accordingly.
Data Manipulation/Falsification: It means manipulating research data with the intention of giving a false impression. This includes manipulating images (e.g. micrographs, gels, radiological images), removing outliers or ‘inconvenient’ results, changing data points, etc.

In the event of alleged or suspected research misconduct, e.g., plagiarism, citation manipulation.

AUTHORSHIP

Each person listed as an author should fulfill the authorship criteria recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE - www.icmje.org). The ICMJE recommends that authorship is based on the following four criteria:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. 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.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he/she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. Also, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors.

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 in the title page of the manuscript.

If the editorial board suspects a case of “gift authorship,” the submission will be rejected without further review. As part of the submission of the manuscript, the corresponding author should also send a short statement declaring that he/she accepts to undertake all the responsibility for authorship during the submission and review stages of the manuscript.

DECLARATION OF INTEREST

Azerbaijan Cardiology Journal requires and encourages the authors and the individuals involved in the evaluation process of submitted manuscripts to disclose any existing or potential conflicts of interests, including financial, consultant, and institutional, that might lead to potential bias or a conflict of interest. Any financial grants or other support received for a submitted study from individuals or institutions should be disclosed to the Editorial Board. To disclose a potential conflict of interest, the ICMJE Potential Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form should be filled in and submitted by all contributing authors. The journal’s Editorial Board resolves cases of a potential conflict of interest of the editors, authors, or reviewers within the scope of COPE and ICMJE guidelines.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Azerbaijan Cardiology Journal is an open access publication, and the journal’s publication model is based on Budapest Access Initiative (BOAI) declaration. All published content is available online, free of charge at amount established by Journal, Authors retain the copyright of their published work in the Azerbaijan Cardiology Journal. The journal’s content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) which permits third parties to share the material for only non-commercial purposes by giving the appropriate credit to the original work. Adaptation and modification of the material is not permitted.

When using previously published content, including figures, tables, or any other material in both print and electronic formats, authors must obtain permission from the copyright holder. Legal, financial and criminal liabilities in this regard belong to the author(s).

DISCLAIMER

Statements or opinions expressed in the manuscripts published in the journal reflect the views of the author(s) and not the opinions of the Azerbaijan Cardiology Journal, editors, editorial board, and/or publisher; the society, editors, editorial board, and publisher disclaim any responsibility or liability for such materials.

Authorship

AKJ follows ICMJE recommendations for attributing authorship, which is based on the following four criteria:

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 reviewing 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.

Individuals must meet ALL four criteria to be listed as authors. Individuals who contributed to the manuscript but who do not meet authorship criteria should be listed in the acknowledgments.

If suspicion is raised about authorship at any point after submission, the journal will suspend peer review. Examples of authorship concerns include “ghost” authorship, when someone who meets authorship criteria is missing from the author list, and “gift” authorship, when some who does not meet authorship criteria is listed in the author list.

The final author lineup and order should be determined by all authors before submission and may not be changed without a written explanation and signed permission of all authors post submission. This policy concerns the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship of accepted manuscripts:

Before the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Requests to add or remove an author, or to rearrange the author names, must be sent to the Managing Editor from the corresponding author of the accepted manuscript and must include (a) the reason the name should be added or removed, or the authors' names rearranged, and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, fax, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal, or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author whose name is being added or removed. Requests that are not sent by the corresponding author will be forwarded by the Managing Editor to the corresponding author, who must follow the procedure as described above. Note that (a) the Managing Editor will inform the Journal Editors of any such requests and (b) publication of the accepted manuscript in an online issue is suspended until authorship has been agreed.
After the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Any requests to add, delete, or rearrange author names in an article published in an online issue will follow the same policies as noted above and will result in a corrigendum.

Language (editing services)

Figures/Tables

It is the author's responsibility to obtain written permission and, where necessary, pay any fees to the copyright holder for republication in AKJ.

Obtain permission for all print, online, and licensed uses from the copyright holder (usually the publisher);
Provide copies of the permission with the submission (attach it as supplemental material in the file upload area in Editorial Manager);
Acknowledge the source in the legend of the figure/table with a numbered reference;
Provide the full citation in the reference list; and
Ensure that any language requirements of the copyright holder have been met (eg, Reproduced with permission from XXX).

All manuscripts submitted to AKJ should be prepared in accordance with the instructions for authors, which adhere to the latest International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

Communication

Communication related to submissions or submission inquiries should come from the corresponding author or principal investigator. Inquiries regarding manuscripts from non-authors, including inquiries from third-party medical writers and commercial medical writing companies, are strongly discouraged and may not receive a reply.

Conflict of interest

A conflict of interest is a financial or intellectual relationship or other set of circumstances that might affect, or reasonably be perceived by others to affect, an author's judgment, conduct, or manuscript. When in doubt, disclose. AKJ asks that authors report any potential conflicts in a 3-year period prior to the date of submission and, if known, any upcoming conflicts. Categories to be reported include royalties or in-kind benefits (eg, travel, accommodations) from a commercial entity, shareholdings, speaker bureau activities, industry advisory committees, expert witness testimony, and litigation related to the subject of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors, on behalf of all the authors of a submission, must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. All authors, including those without competing interests to declare, should provide the relevant information to the corresponding author (which, where relevant, may specify they have nothing to declare). Corresponding authors should then use this tool to create a shared statement and upload to the submission system at the Attach Files step.

Please do not convert the .docx template to another file type. Author signatures are not required.

Ethics Committee/IRB Approval/Helsinki Declaration

For any studies involving patients (including chart reviews), a statement of review and approval must be included. For example: "This study was conducted in accordance with the amended Declaration of Helsinki. Local institutional review boards or independent ethics committees approved the protocol, and written informed consent was obtained from all patients."

The name of the committee and the approval number should follow this statement in the Materials and Methods section. If this is a multicenter study, the list may be provided in a separate Word document to be published as Supplemental Material.

Process for Manuscript Review and Decisions

All submissions are initially reviewed by the Editor in Chief, who assesses papers according to the following basic criteria: originality, timeliness, scope, importance to readers, quality of content, appropriateness of methods, validity of data, and reasonability of conclusions.

Papers that do not meet the basic criteria for publication in AKJ, are rejected without review. All other papers are assigned to the journal’s Associate Editors, who oversee the peer review process.

The journal’s Associate Editors assign papers to expert peer reviewers for feedback. The journal uses a double-anonymized peer review process, which means the identities of the authors are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa. The journal’s peer review process is strictly confidential: only peer reviewers and editorial staff are aware of manuscripts under review, and no information about a specific manuscript or its content may be shared with outside parties without first seeking permission from the journal editors.

After the Associate Editors receive the peer reviewers’ comments, they make a decision recommendation to the journal’s Editor in Chief. The Editor in Chief makes the final decision for all manuscripts. In the event that the Editor in Chief or Associate Editor has a relevant conflict of interest, the editor will recuse themselves and an alternate editor will be assigned.

Peer Review

Privacy and Informed Consent

Authors must omit from their text, tables, figures, and supplemental data any identifying details regarding patients and study participants, including names, initials, date of birth, Social Security numbers, dates, or medical record numbers (even when patient consent has been obtained). Authors must obtain written informed permission from the patient, guardian, or next of kin when individual cases are presented. Copies of the permission must be provided to AKJ prior to publication. If the patient has died or is otherwise unavailable, then permission must be sought from the next of kin.

Written patient permission to publish is required for all case-based sections of AKJ.

All authors are responsible for ensuring the submission complies with the national legislation on privacy and research.