Advances in Clinical and Experimental Medicine

Title abbreviation: Adv Clin Exp Med
JCR Impact Factor (IF) – 2.1 (5-Year IF – 2.0)
Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) (2023) – 0.4
Scopus CiteScore – 3.7 (CiteScore Tracker 3.8)
Index Copernicus  – 171.00; MNiSW – 70 pts

ISSN 1899–5276 (print)
ISSN 2451-2680 (online)
Periodicity – monthly

Ethical standards and procedures

Ethical consideration

The authors are required to follow the ethical principles for clinical research based on the Declaration of Helsinki. The Methods section in original articles and research-in-progress should clearly state that the study was approved by an appropriate institutional review board or ethics committee and that patients provided written informed consent to participate in the study. All personal details of patients must be kept confidential.

Papers describing animal experiments can be accepted for publication only if the experiment conforms to the legal requirements in Poland as well as with the European Communities Council Directive as of November 24, 1986 or the National Institute of Health Guide (National Institute of Health Publications No. 80-23, Revised 1978) for the care and use of Laboratory Animals for experimental procedure. Authors must provide a full description of their anesthetics and surgical procedures.

Duties and responsibilities of authors

The Authors are obliged to prepare and send the article in accordance with the requirements set out in Instructions for Authors. Moreover, the Authors are obliged to submit statements which will include: a statement about the originality of the content of the article (work not yet published anywhere), the integrity of the copyrights of others, no conflict of interest or its application, as well as the superior permission to publish an article in the journal. Authors are obliged to participate in peer review process. The Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes, they also should provide a list of references following AMA style guide.

We require the Materials and methods section to provide sufficient detail to allow replication of the study. Study design should be described in detail, and reagent description should facilitate replication (for example, source and purity should be specified, there should be evidence that antibodies have been validated, and cell lines should be authenticated). Statistics must also be comprehensively described, as outlined below. Materials/samples used in the analysis must be made available to any researcher for purposes of directly replicating the procedure. Authors are also expected to honor reasonable (consistent with community standards) requests for research materials/samples to the extent feasible, so that other research groups can extend and advance the results.

Authors are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships that might bias or be seen to bias their work. Authors may, at any time before accepting the article for publication, withdraw the article by submitting a statement in the Editorial System.

Should any conflict of interest arise, it should be reported while submitting the manuscript in a dedicated section of the submission procedure in our Editorial System. More on conflict of interest:

https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-systems-and-software/policies/conflict-of-interest-guidelines-for-reviewers

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

  • Data availability

See the section Data sharing below.

https://advances.umw.edu.pl/en/data-sharing

  • Consent for publication

We often find that authors have confused consent for publication with consent for participation in their study. For the purpose of this document, "consent" refers to consent to publish personal information about an individual, and not informed consent for participation in a study.

If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section.

Complaints

If concerns are raised regarding scientific soundness or originality of a published manuscript, or figure manipulation or other forms of misconduct are alleged in a direct email to the editor or publisher,  supported by sound evidence, the editor/publisher responds to the  person who raised concerns saying that they are going to investigate and will let them know the outcome but will not necessarily be in contact regularly before then. If the evidence is not provided in the initial communication, the editor/publisher requests it. Based on the evidence material, the editor/publisher investigates according to the appropriate COPE flowchart. If there is an outcome to the investigation, such as a correction or retraction, the person who originally raised the concern is informed about the outcome of the case. Concerns raised via social media are treated in the same way as raised directly if evidence is provided in the initial claim or after a request.

Plagiarism and duplicate publications

All manuscripts submitted to Advances in Clinical and Experimental Medicine are checked for plagiarism using Similarity Check, a service enabling editors to screen published and submitted content for originality by providing access to the iThenticate software. Cases of suspected scientific misconduct, including plagiarism and duplicate publications, are handled according to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ Core Practices guidance.

Data falsification/fabrication

Data falsification 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, adding or omitting data points, etc. Suspected fabricated data in a submitted manuscript will be investigated according to the relevant COPE procedure. Suspected fabricated data in a published manuscript will also be dealt with following the appropriate COPE procedure.

Data fabrication is understood as making up research findings. Cases of suspected data fabrication will be investigated according to relevant COPE procedure.

Journal policy on data sharing and reproducibility

All papers submitted to Adv Clin Exp Med since August 15, 2024, will be subject to our new policy concerning data sharing.

Please note that availability of data from the corresponding author on request is no longer an option.

Adv Clin Exp Med requires the Authors of all original papers to make all data necessary to replicate the results of their study publicly available without restriction when the paper is submitted to the journal (relevant information must be registered in the Editorial System at the time of submission). The following provisions apply only to original papers (including research letters). They do not apply to reviews and meta-analyses.

All the data and related metadata underlying the reported findings should be deposited in appropriate public data repositories unless already provided as part of the submitted article. Authors must deposit the data when submitting the paper to the journal. It is not permitted to deposit the dataset after the manuscript has been accepted for publication.

The chosen repository will assign DOI to the deposited dataset - one for the whole dataset, not separate DOIs for each file (should there be multiple files). The most popular repository is [https://zenodo.org/]. The format and number of deposited data files are entirely up to the authors. 

Authors are required to provide a Data Availability Statement (DAS) describing compliance with the journal’s data policy. It should occur in the main text of the manuscript, in the final section Declarations, after Conclusions. The statement should include the following information:

The datasets supporting the findings of the current study are openly available in [repository name] at [DOI].

Papers not including any declaration concerning data sharing will not enter peer review until such declaration is provided.

Accordingly, Authors of original papers and research letters should not upload in the Editorial System any supplementary files with relevant data. All supplementary files referred to in the manuscript (supplementary tables, supplementary figures and others) must be a part of the shared dataset deposited in the repository). Even if there are no data to share, any Supplementary files (referred or not referred to in the text) should be deposited in a repository and a single DOI of this deposit should be provided in the data availability statement.

Please be advised that Additional files uploaded into the Editorial System are NOT VISIBLE to the reviewers, while an URL in the Data sharing declaration is available to them.

MORE INFORMATION

https://advances.umw.edu.pl/en/data-sharing

Citation manipulation

Citation manipulation is a problem when references do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article, and are included solely to increase citations. Any party which includes or requests to add citations where the motivations are merely self-promotional violates publication ethics. Cases of suspected citation manipulation will be investigated according to appropriate COPE document.

Duties and responsibilities of reviewers

Articles are selected for publication in double-blind selection system and published in open access mode. Reviewers review manuscripts via Editorial System on the basis of questions prepared by journal’s Editorial Board. It is also possible for a reviewer to send individual comments to be published in the article content. All judgements and findings in the peer-review process should be objective. Reviewers should have no conflict of interest (they make a statement before proceeding to review). Reviewers - if there is a legitimate need - should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited. The articles reviewed by them should be treated confidentially prior to their publication.

Duties and responsibilities of editors

Editors are responsible for deciding which articles are accepted for publication. Editors act in a balanced, objective and fair way while carrying out their expected duties, without discrimination on grounds of gender, sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs, ethnic or geographical origin of the authors. Publisher and Editors are always ready to publish corrections, clarifications, withdrawals and apologies if there is a legitimate need. In the situation when there is a suspicion that an inappropriate research procedure described in the work sent by authors has taken place, the authors are obliged by the Editorial Office - if not yet submitted - to submit information regarding the approval of the described research procedure by a properly established ethics committee to conduct clinical trials.

In-house submissions, i.e. papers authored by Editors or Editorial Board members of the title, will be sent to Editors unaffiliated with the author or institution and monitored carefully to ensure there is no peer review bias.

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

ACEM is a signatory of San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which intends to halt the practice of correlating the journal impact factor to the merits of a specific scientist's contributions. Such practice creates biases and inaccuracies when appraising scientific research. It also states that the impact factor is not to be used as a substitute measure of the quality of individual research articles, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. It has become a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines and all key stakeholders including funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers. We encourage all individuals and organizations who are interested in developing and promoting best practice in the assessment of scholarly research to sign DORA.

Its objectives are:

1. Raise awareness

To call attention to new tools and processes in research assessment and the responsible use of metrics that align with core academic values and promote consistency and transparency in decision-making.

2. Facilitate implementation

To aid development of new policies and practices for hiring, promotion, and funding decisions.

3. Catalyze change

To spread research assessment reform broadly by working across scholarly disciplines and globally.

4. Improve equity

To call for broader representation of researchers in the design of research assessment practices that directly address the structural inequalities in academia.

 

https://sfdora.org/

How Journals and Publishers Can Help to Reform Research Assessment?