Editorial Policy

Full Length Research Articles

Articles are original research report whose finding and conclusions represent a substantial advance in understanding of an important problem in life sciences and have significant impact. They do not normally exceed 5 pages (should not exceed 5000 words) and have no more than 50 references. It should include a structured summary (abstract), with four paragraphs (Background, Methods, Result and Conclusion) not more than 250 words with no references, numbers, acronyms, abbreviation or measurements if not necessary. Articles should have 5 to 8 figures or tables as display items.

Funding agency must be mentioned in the end of article.

Use the SI system of units and gene names approved by the Human Gene Organization. Novel gene sequences should be submitted in a public database (GenBank, EMBL, or DDBJ) and their accession number should be mentioned in the text.

Short Communication

In this part, we publish original short communications from authors which are not more than 1-4 pages with structured or un-structured summary. Short Communications provides researchers with a venue where they can share their most current results and developments in the shortest possible time. The short communications, like regular papers in the Journal will be peer-reviewed and evaluated by the editor before publication.

Review Articles

Reviews should be overviews of major topics connected to any aspect of life sciences but it must address a specific field of current interest. A broad review is discouraged. Complete briefing about the choice of literature included is necessary to any Review paper. Therefore, all Reviews should have “Search strategy and selection criteria” section, which describes the material covered, databases consulted, search terms used and the criteria applied to include or exclude materiel.

Historical Reviews should be 3000-5000 words, with a maximum of 150 references. A 150-words unstructured summary should be included.

Editorials are the voice of PJICM and are written by board of the editorial members.

Commentaries and Correspondence

Commentaries (of 700-900 words having up to 15 references) may discuss articles published in PJICM or in other journals. Correspondences are written as letter in response to articles published specifically in Pakistan journal of intensive care medicine. They may include corrections of already published peer-reviewed articles in Journal. They must appear before editorial board in 10 weeks after publication of that very material. They must not extend than 450 words and have 5 or 6 references.

Letters to Editor

Letters are brief reports of original research whose importance will be of interest to scientists and researchers in other fields. It should describe how your results could move some scientific field forward. They must be contained in 4 pages and 1,500 words other than references. References should not count more than 40. In start, a summary must be given with briefly discussing relevance of your work with different area of research.

Metadata Analysis and Survey Reports

PJICM welcomes metadata analysis and survey reports for publication. The abstract of your analysis and survey report should appear as structured summary (Background, Methods, Result and Conclusion). The data repositories consulted must be accessible and legible to every user. In survey report, a “Recommendation” paragraph must be added in the end which must prescribe the future strategies for a specific problem to policy makers.

It should not exceed than 10 pages without references. Reference count is desirable up to 20 but may extend up to 30 if required.

Statistical Methods

Report enough details of your experimental design so that the results can be judged for validity and so that previous experiments may serve as a basis for the design of future experiments.

Validation of Field Results

Manuscript Publication Charges

Currently, PJICM is publishing articles with minimal 120USD charging as Publishing fee.

Declaration of Conflict of Interest / Competing Interest

A competing interest often called a conflict of interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain or personal rivalry). It may arise for the authors of an article in PJICM when they have a financial interest that may influence, probably without their knowing, their interpretation of their results or those of others.

We believe that, to make the best decision on how to deal with an article, we should know about any competing interests that authors may have, and that if we publish the article readers should know about them too. We are not aiming to eradicate such interests across all article types in the PJICM. However, certain articles (see below) fall under a stricter policy. This means that authors whose financial conflicts of interest are judged to be relevant by the PJICM team are not permitted to publish these articles.

A declaration of interests (samples here) on behalf of all authors from corresponding author must be received before an article can be reviewed and accepted for publication.

All articles that are editorials and education articles including clinical reviews, practice articles, Pakistan journal of intensive care medicine / comparative efficiency testing articles, articles regarding new antimicrobial sources and drug efficiency testing articles.

PJICM has implemented a policy for such articles to be written by authors without relevant financial ties to industry. By “industry” we mean companies producing drugs, devices, or tests; medical education companies; or other companies with an interest in the topic of the article.

We consider the following relationships with industry to be relevant, making it unlikely that we would be able to publish your work.

 

  • Ownership of stocks and shares.
  • Travel and accommodation expenses.
  • Paid consultancy or directorship.
  • Patent ownership.
  • Paid membership of speakers panels/bureaus and advisory board.
  • Acting as an expert witness.
  • Being in receipt of a fellowship, equipment, writing, or administrative support.
  • Writing or consulting for a medical education promotional or communications company.

When submitting an editorial, clinical review or medical practice article:​
The corresponding author should insert within their manuscript a summary statement. This will be included in the published article.

Article Withdrawal Policy

It is a general principle of scholarly communication that the editor of a learned journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal shall be published. In making this decision the editor is guided by policies of the journal’s editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. An outcome of this principle is the importance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historic record of the transactions of scholarship. Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as far as is possible. However, very occasionally circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or even removed. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances.

This policy has been designed to address these concerns and to take into account current best practice in the scholarly and library communities. As standards evolve and change, we will revisit this issue and welcome the input of scholarly and library communities. We believe these issues require international standards and we will be active in lobbying various information bodies to establish international standards and best practices that the publishing and information industries can adopt.

Article Withdrawal

Only used for Articles in Press which represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain errors, or may have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, but less frequently, the articles may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Articles in Press (articles that have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published and will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information) that include errors, or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published article(s), or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors (such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like), may be “Withdrawn” from PJICM. Withdrawn means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with a HTML page and PDF simply stating that the article has been withdrawn according to the Pakistan journal of intensive care medicine on Article in Press Withdrawal with a link to the current policy document.

Article Retraction

Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Occasionally a retraction will be used in case of failing to reproduce the results or correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by PJICM:

A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article. The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself. The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted.” The HTML version of the document is removed.

Article Removal: Legal limitations

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. This will only occur where the article is clearly defamatory, or infringes others’ legal rights, or where the article is, or we have good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances, while the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article Replacement

In cases where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances the procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that the database retraction notice will publish a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document.

Plagiarism Detection

PJICM takes publication ethics very seriously and abides by the best practice guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics. Pakistan journal of intensive care medicine verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. Turnitin checks submissions against millions of published articles, and billions of web content. Authors, researchers and freelancers can also use Turnitin to screen their work before submission. Every article is screened on submission and any that is deemed to overlap more than trivially with other publications will be rejected automatically with no right of appeal.