Editorial Policy

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Trauma International follows the COPE (Committee for Publication Ethics) Guidelines and decisions about duplicate publication, plagiarism, and article retraction are taken as per COPE Flowcharts. [Click Here to Download COPE Flowcharts]. All Authors need to report that their manuscript is an original publication and should sign the contributors’ form and conflict of interest form for each publication. The review process is a double-blind peer reviewed.

Trauma International  has the following salient points on Ethics and Malpractice

  1. Publication and authorship :
  •  A list of funding agencies, financial support is to be disclosed.
  •  No plagiarism, no fraudulent data.
  •  Forbidden to publish same research in more than one journal.
  1. Author’s responsibilities :
  • All authors are obliged to participate in the peer-review process.
  • All authors have to significantly contribute to the research.
  • A statement that all data in the article are real and authentic is to be given by all authors.
  • All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
  1. Peer review/responsibility for the reviewers :
  • Judgments should be objective.
  • Reviewers should have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors, and/or the research funders.
  • Reviewers should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited.
  • Reviewed articles should be treated confidentially.
    More details on Peer Review can be found HERE
  1. Editorial responsibilities:
  • e.g. editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.
  • Editors have no conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept.
  • Only accept a paper when reasonably certain.
  • When errors are found, promote the publication of correction or retraction.
  • Preserve anonymity of reviewers.
    Trauma International follows the Editorial responsibilities as noted by COPE guidelines: Click Here
  1. Publishing ethics issues
  • Monitoring/safeguarding publishing ethics by the editorial board.
  • Guidelines for retracting articles are as per the COPE guidelines.
  • Maintain the integrity of the academic record.
  • Journal is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
  • No plagiarism, no fraudulent data.

Open Access Policy

Open Access Publication and Creative Commons Licensing
This is an open-access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.

The Editorial Process

  • The manuscript will be double-blind reviewed for possible publication with the understanding that they are being submitted to one journal at a time and has not been published, simultaneously submitted, or already accepted for publication elsewhere. Violation may lead to serious action against authors as per COPE guidelines
  • The Editorial Board will review all submitted manuscripts initially.
  • Manuscripts that seem to lack scientific message or content are rejected at first instance. Journal will not return unaccepted manuscripts.
  • Manuscripts that are not formatted as per journal guidelines will be sent for correct formatting before the review process.
  • The manuscript that gets approval from the editorial board and is formatted as per guidelines, will be sent for peer review by at least two expert reviewers [This number may exceed in cases where we do not get a definitive answer by two reviews]. The review process is blinded for the author, Institution, or place of origin of the manuscript. The journal wishes to publish the names of all our reviewers, however, the reviewer’s names will be kept blinded in terms of specific manuscripts.
  • The editorial team takes a final decision based on the comments received from the reviewers and also from the section editors
  • The contributors are usually informed about the reviewers’ comments and acceptance/rejection within a period of 10 to 12 weeks. This period may get extended in cases where more than two opinions are needed.
  • Articles accepted would be copyedited for grammar, punctuation, print style, and format. All articles will also be rewritten by the Editorial team and a final copy will be sent to authors for approval.
  • Page proofs will be sent to the corresponding author, which has to be returned within 4 days.

Authorship Criteria

  • Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions.
  • To conception and design or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data.
  • Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
  • Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship.
  • General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship.
  • The order of naming the contributors should be based on the relative contribution of the contributor. Once submitted the order cannot be changed without the written consent of all the contributors.
  • For an original article the number of contributors should not exceed six; for case reports, the letter to the Editor, and review articles, the number of contributors should not exceed four.
  • A justification should be included if the number of contributors exceeds these limits.
  • Only those who have done substantial work in a particular field can write a review article. A short summary of the work done in the field of review should accompany the manuscript.

Contributors’ form and copyright form

The contributors’ form and copyright transfer form duly signed by all the authors/contributors (in the same sequence as to be published in the journal) is to be uploaded directly on the website at the time of submission of the new manuscript. Manuscript submission will be considered incomplete till the completed forms are submitted.

Online Submission of the Manuscripts

The manuscript is to be submitted only online using submission software “Scripture” [Click Here]

New authors will have to register as on our online submission system Scripture [Click Here], which is a simple two-step procedure.

Ethics

When reporting experiments on human subjects, 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 http://www.wma.net/e/policy/17-c_e.html).

Do not use patients’ 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 were followed.

All human and animal studies should be accompanied by a certificate of Ethics clearance, issued by an appropriate Institutional Review Board/Ethics Committee/ Departmental Board of Study or an equivalent authority of competence.

Statistics

Statistical methods should be described in detail.

The statement “no significant difference was found between two groups” cannot be made unless a power study was done and the value of alpha or beta is reported. Use of the word significant requires reporting of a p-value.

Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are required whenever the results of survivorship analysis are given in the text or graphs.

Use of the word correlation requires reporting of the correlation coefficient.

Acknowledgments

  • As an appendix to the text, one or more statements should specify.
  • Contributions that need acknowledging but do not justify authorship, such as general support by a departmental chair.
  • Acknowledgments of technical help.
  • Acknowledgments of financial and material support, which should specify the nature of the support.
  • This should be included on the title page of the manuscript.

Protection of Patients’ Rights to Privacy

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/guardian, wherever applicable) provides informed consent for publication. Authors should remove patients’ names from figures unless they have obtained informed consent from the patients. The journal abides by the ICMJE guidelines:

1. Authors, and not the Journal or its Publisher, need to obtain the patient consent form before submitting their work for publication consideration to Trauma International. Authors should ensure that this patient consent form(s) are properly archived. The consent forms should not be uploaded with the cover letter or sent through email to the Editorial or Publisher offices.
2. If the manuscript contains patient images that preclude anonymity or a description that has an obvious indication of the identity of the patient, a statement about obtaining informed patient consent should be indicated in the manuscript.
3. To protect the patient’s identity, the recognizable facial features not related to the study should be digitally blurred
4. Written informed consent is the preferred method for obtaining consent. If verbal consent is obtained, the authors must ensure that the verbal consent is recorded in the medical case record of the patient and duly signed by witnesses.

Sending a revised manuscript

The revised version of the manuscript should be submitted online in a manner similar to that used for the 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 of the revised file itself. In addition, they are expected to mark the changes as underlined or colored text in the article.

Policy against Plagiarism

The Journal follows strict anti-plagiarism policy and defines plagiarism as the duplicate publication of the author’s own work, in whole or in part without proper citation, or mispresenting other’s ideas, words, and other creative expressions as one’s own. All manuscripts submitted to Trauma International undergo plagiarism check using an internet search. Only in cases of minor duplication or similarity with previously published work, the authors may be provided an opportunity to rectify the same; in all other cases, the manuscript is desk rejected along with the plagiarism report (please also see the Scientific Misconduct section for additional details).

Scientific Misconduct

If plagiarism is detected after publication, the Journal will investigate the same, and if established, the authors’ institution and funding bodies would be notified, and the article will be retracted. To report plagiarism, please contact the Journal office, preferably through email for better documentation of correspondence.
For duplicate publication, fabricated data, undisclosed conflict of interest, plagiarism, and/or other issues of publication and scientific misconduct, Trauma International follows the guidance produced by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).
Trauma International endeavors to avoid all possible misconduct. All manuscripts are checked for plagiarism using Google search. If the Editor or a reviewer is concerned that some aspect of a submitted article may constitute a misconduct in research, publication or professional behavior, the Journal communicates the same to the author(s) and seeks clarification. However, if the concerns are not satisfactorily resolved by discussion with the author(s), the Journal may report the same to appropriate authorities such as their institutions and, for duplicate publication, the journal in which the previous publication had appeared.
The Journal also encourages its readers to report any published article in which they suspect misconduct through e-mail or letter. The anonymity of the complainant would be maintained at all times

Sending a revised manuscript

  • Before submitting a revised manuscript, contributors are requested to ensure that each and every comment of the reviewers/editorial board is answered.
  • Also mention the changes in the column in form of Page No. & Line No.
  • These changes should be clearly mentioned in the revised manuscript.

Copyright

The entire contents of Trauma International are protected under India and international copyrights. However, the Journal grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to use, copy, 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 uses a recent Creative Commons License.

Acceptance or rejection

Manuscripts are judged on the interest and importance of the topic, intellectual and scientific strength, clarity of presentation, and relevance to Trauma International readers.

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Trauma International follows the COPE (Committee for Publication Ethics) Guidelines and decisions about duplicate publication, plagiarism, and article retraction are taken as per COPE Flowcharts. [Click Here to Download COPE Flowcharts]. All Authors need to report that this is an original publication and should sign the contributors’ form and conflict of interest form for each publication.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is not permitted and Journal will check every article for plagiarism using an internet search.

Conflicts of Interest/Competing Interests

All authors of articles must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with the 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. If the articles are authored by the editorial board, the conflict of interest must be clearly stated.

Complaints and Appeals

This procedure applies to complaints about the publishing policies, procedures, and/or actions of the Trauma International’ Editorial staff. This complaint must relate to content or a procedure that was the responsibility of Trauma International or its Editor.
If the authors strongly believe that their manuscript was wrongly rejected, they can register an appeal with the Journal by emailing a detailed explanation to editor.trauma.international@gmail.com. The appeals will be acknowledged by the Editorial Office and will be investigated in an unbiased manner. While under appeal, the said manuscript should not be submitted to other journals. The final decision rests with the Editor-in-Chief, and second appeals are not considered.
The Journal only accepts complaints through the above-mentioned e-mail, as this provides a reliable trail. All complaints are acknowledged at the earliest. The complaint would be followed up in an unbiased manner and be handled by the person to whom they are made, if possible. The Journal aims to resolve any complaint raised within 2–4 weeks; however, if that is not possible, an interim response would be provided until the complaint is resolved.