Journal of Ophthalmology (Ukraine) is a journal that follows the ICMJE's Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.(ICMJE's for the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors).

More: http://www.icmje.org/downloads/coi_disclosure.pdf  Updated December 2019 

 

Authorship 

Each person listed as an author is expected to have participated in the study to a significant extent. To qualify as a contributing author, one must meet all of the following criteria (The criteria of authorship are defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)):

1.Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; 

2.Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 

3.Final approval of the version to be published; 

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.

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged, i.e. noted in the Acknowledgments section of the manuscript. 

The individuals who conduct the work are responsible for identifying who meets these criteria and ideally should do so when planning the work, making modifications as appropriate as the work progresses. It is the collective responsibility of the authors, not the journal to which the work is submitted, to determine that all people named as authors meet all four criteria. Each author must sign a copy of the Authorship Responsibility form and submit it at the time of manuscript submission. DOWNLOAD The Authorship Responsibility form

The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way.

 

Disclosure of Financial and Non-Financial Relationships and Activities, and Conflicts of Interest

The potential for conflict of interest and bias 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). 

Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable, the ones most often judged to represent potential conflicts of interest and thus the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and science itself. Other interests may also represent or be perceived as conflicts, such as personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, and intellectual beliefs. 

Authors must consider and disclose their relationships and activities when fulfilling their roles in the process of article publication.

When authors submit a manuscript of any type or format authors are responsible for disclosing all relationships and activities that might bias or be seen to bias their work. Each author must sign a copy of the Potential Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form and submit it at the time of manuscript submission. DOWNLOAD Conflict of Interest Form

The ICMJE has developed a Disclosure Form to facilitate and standardize authors’ disclosures. Journal of Ophthalmology encourage our authors to use this form. To use the form: 1. Download the form to your computer;  2. Open the form in Adobe Acrobat Reader, fill it out and then save it to your computer; 3. Submit the form directly to the Journal of Ophthalmology when submitting your manuscript. DOWNLOAD ICMJE Potential Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form  

 

Protection of Research Participants

Helsinki Declaration. All investigators should ensure that the planning conduct and reporting of human research are in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration. All authors should seek approval to conduct research from an independent local, regional, or national review body (e.g., ethics committee, institutional review board). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the local, regional, or national review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. 

Patient consent and anonymity. Patients have a right to privacy that should not be violated without informed consent. Identifying information, including names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that an identifiable patient be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should disclose to these patients whether any potential identifiable material might be available via the Internet as well as in print after publication. Patient consent should be written and archived with the authors. When informed consent has been obtained, it should be indicated in the published article. 

Experiments on Animals. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the International Association of Veterinary Editors’ Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare.

Clinical trials. Clinical trials must be registered before the start of patient enrollment in public trials registry at or before the time of first patient enrollment as a condition of consideration for publication. The trial registration number must be reported in the paper.

Manuscript preparation

Types of articles 

Journal encourages the submission of article types as follows:

1)    original and topical articles (including illustrations, literature review, abstract) volumed up to 10-13 pages A4

2)    literature review – 10-15 pages A4

3)    case reports– 3-4 pages A4

4)    innovation proposal, reviews – 2-3 pages A4

5)    short reports – 1.5-2 pages A4

General recommendations

The text must be printed with 1.5 spacing on a standard A4 paper (top, left, bottom margins are 2 cm; right – 1 cm) with no more than 30 rows on a page. Text editor hyphenation is not recommended.

The manuscript can be written in Ukrainian, Russian, or English. Electronic version of the article, including the text of the article with supplementary electronic material and documents, must be submitted on-line through the journal’s Web site.

Electronic text must be a Word document with extension .doc, .docs or .rtf. The graphic objects (illustrations or drawings) are not allowed to be imported in the text. They must be sent in separate graphic files (see below). It’s not recommended to use the text editor hyphenation. Tables, diagrams and graphics in Word text editor should be created only in the same text editor.

Electronic illustrations should be in separate graphic files with extension .jpg, .gif,  .png, .tif, or .pdf with resolution 200-300 dpi.

Manuscript Sections

The text of an article reporting original research is usually divided into Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections, so-called “IMRAD” structure. Articles can have subheadings within these sections to further organize their content. 

Other types of articles, such as meta-analyses, may require different formats, while case reports, narrative reviews, and editorials may have less structured or unstructured formats. 

The following are general requirements for reporting within sections of all study designs and manuscript formats.

a.Title Page

The page of title must contain the general information about an article and its authors and usually include the article title, author information, any disclaimers, sources of support, and the number of tables and figures.

Article title: The title provides a distilled description of the complete article.

Author information: Surname and initials of each author with highest academic or medical degree and each author's departmental affiliation and the institution where the study was carried out.

Corresponding author: Name, postal address, telephone number and e-mail of the author responsible for corresponding and contacting other authors in order to remake, correct and finally approve the version. This author can also be a person responsible for experimentation in general; but it also can be another reliable person. Author responsible for corresponding must indicate definitely if his e-mail may be published (e-mail is published unless otherwise specified).

Author contribution: information about the contribution of each author to the work should be provided

Acknowledgments: Contributors who do not meet all 4 of the criteria for authorship and, thus, cannot be listed as authors should be noted here.

Disclaimers. An example of a disclaimer is an author’s statement that the views expressed in the submitted article are his or her own and not an official position of the institution or funder.

Source(s) of support. These include grants, equipment, drugs, and/or other support that facilitated conduct of the work described in the article or the writing of the article itself.

Abbreviations. All abbreviations used in the text of the article should be provided with their decoding.

Disclosure of relationships and activities. Please, include Disclosure of relationships and activities on the manuscript title page according to your submitted Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest (in order to save the work of collecting forms from each author prior to making an editorial decision or to save reviewers and readers the work of reading each author’s form.) 

Number of figures and tables. Please, specify the number of Figures and Tables before uploading the relevant files. These numbers allow editorial staff and reviewers to confirm that all figures and tables are actually included with the manuscript.

b.Abstract and Keywords 

The second page must contain the abstract. The abstract should be of not more than 200 words. 

Original research, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses must be structured as: Introduction, Purpose, Methods, Results (explicit data and their statistical significance), and Conclusion. 

The case reports, literature reviews, innovation proposals, reviews, and short reports may have other formats. 

For clinical trial abstracts, the clinical trial registration number must be specified at the end of the abstract.

Authors need to ensure that they accurately reflect the content of the article. The abstract should provide the context or background for the study and should state the study's purpose, basic procedures (selection of study participants, settings, measurements, analytical methods), main findings (giving specific effect sizes and their statistical and clinical significance, if possible), and principal conclusions. 

Keywords. Under the abstract there must be placed 3-8 key-words or short phrases reflecting the main issues in the article and under which you believe the article should be indexed.

c. Introduction

Provide a context or background for the study (that is, the nature of the problem and its significance). 

State the specific purpose or research objective of, or hypothesis tested by, the study or observation. 

Cite only directly pertinent references, and do not include data or conclusions from the work being reported.

d. Material and Methods

The guiding principle of the Methods section should be clarity about how and why a study was done in a particular way.

The Methods section should aim to be sufficiently detailed such that others with access to the data would be able to reproduce the results. 

In general, the section should include only information that was available at the time the plan or protocol for the study was being written; all information obtained during the study belongs in the Results section. 

If an organization was paid or otherwise contracted to help conduct the research (examples include data collection and management), then this should be detailed in the methods. 

The Methods section should include a statement indicating that the research was approved by an independent local, regional or national review body (e.g., ethics committee, institutional review board). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the local, regional or national review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. 

i. Selection and Description of Participants

Clearly describe the selection of observational or experimental participants (healthy individuals or patients, including controls), including eligibility and exclusion criteria and a description of the source population. 

If the study was done involving an exclusive population, for example in only one sex, authors should justify why, except in obvious cases (e.g., prostate cancer). Authors should define how they determined race or ethnicity and justify their relevance. 

ii. Technical Information

Specify the study’s main and secondary objectives—usually identified as primary and secondary outcomes. 

Identify methods, equipment (give the manufacturer’s name and address in parentheses), and procedures in sufficient detail to allow others to reproduce the results. 

Give references to established methods, including statistical methods; provide references and brief descriptions for methods that have been published but are not well-known; describe new or substantially modified methods, give the reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations. 

Identify precisely all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration. Identify appropriate scientific names and gene names.

iii. Statistics

Describe statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to judge its appropriateness for the study and to verify the reported results. 

When possible, quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). 

Avoid relying solely on statistical hypothesis testing, such as P values, which fail to convey important information about effect size and precision of estimates. 

References for the design of the study and statistical methods should be to standard works when possible (with pages stated). 

Define statistical terms, abbreviations, and most symbols. 

Specify the statistical software package(s) and versions used. Distinguish prespecified from exploratory analyses, including subgroup analyses.

e. Results

Present your results in logical sequence in the text, tables, and illustrations, giving the main or most important findings first. 

Do not repeat all the data in the tables or illustrations in the text; emphasize or summarize only the most important observations. 

Provide data on all primary and secondary outcomes identified in the Methods section. 

When data are summarized in the Results section, give numeric results not only as derivatives (for example, percentages) but also as the absolute numbers from which the derivatives were calculated, and specify the statistical methods used to analyze them. 

Restrict tables and figures to those needed to explain the argument of the paper and to assess supporting data. 

Use graphs as an alternative to tables with many entries; do not duplicate data in graphs and tables. 

Avoid nontechnical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as “random” (which implies a randomizing device), “normal,” “significant,” “correlations,” and “sample.” 

f. Discussion

It is useful to begin the discussion by briefly summarizing the main findings, and explore possible mechanisms or explanations for these findings. 

Emphasize the new and important aspects of your study and put your findings in the context of the totality of the relevant evidence. 

State the limitations of your study, and explore the implications of your findings for future research and for clinical practice or policy. 

Do not repeat in detail data or other information given in other parts of the manuscript, such as in the Introduction or the Results section. 

Link the conclusions with the goals of the study but avoid unqualified statements and conclusions not adequately supported by the data. 

In particular, distinguish between clinical and statistical significance, and avoid making statements on economic benefits and costs unless the manuscript includes the appropriate economic data and analyses. 

Avoid claiming priority or alluding to work that has not been completed. 

g. References 

The reference list is attached separately. 

The bibliography must contain mostly the papers of the latest 7-8 years which are directly related to the topic. 

Only published works should be listed in the reference list. While citing abstracts of theses or monographs their title should be pointed. 

References should follow the Vancouver format. 

Citations in the text must be given in square brackets and numbered according to reference list. 

References should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text. 

To minimize citation errors, references should be verified using either an electronic bibliographic source, such as PubMed, or print copies from original sources. 

The titles of journals should be abbreviated according to the style used for MEDLINE (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals).

In listed references, all names of authors should be given, unless there are more than four. If there are five or more, list the first three, followed by "et al." 

References to journal articles should include (1) author, (2) title, (3) journal name (as abbreviated in MEDLINE), (4) year, (5) volume number, and (6) inclusive page numbers, in that order. 

Example:

Bakhritdinova FA, Narzikulova KI, Mirrakhimova SSh. Effect of photodynamic doses of laser irradiation on endogenous intoxication indices. Journal of Ophthalmology (Ukraine). 2015;4:54-8.

References to books should include (1) author(s), (2) chapter title (if any), (3) editor (if any), (4) title of book, (5) city of publication, (6) publisher, (7) year, and (8) page numbers. Volume and edition numbers, and names of translator should be included when appropriate. 

Example:

Jenkins PF. Making sense of the chest x-ray: a hands-on guide. New York: Oxford University Press; 2005. 194 p.

If there is any doubt about abbreviation of a journal name, it should be spelled out completely. For more details:  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/citingmedicine

Since Oftalmalogicheskii Zhurnal is a CrossRef member, we ask authors to provide us with electronic references (links to articles on the title’s website or article’s DOI) within parentheses in numbered references following the text.

 

Tables

Number consecutively as they are presented in the text. Tables should be graphic and have a name. Their titles should exactly match the content graphs.

All data in the tables must be carefully verified, meet data in the text and always treated statistically. 

Authors should place explanatory matter in footnotes, not in the heading. Identify statistical measures of variations, such as standard deviation (SD) and standard error of the mean (m). 

The tables in the Word editor can be created only in this editor. Tables can be placed both in the text of the article and on a separate sheet of paper.

 

Illustrations 

Figures should be numbered consecutively according to the order in which they have been cited in the text. 

Figures must be submitted as individual files named according to its number in the text. They cannot be embedded in the word document. If the images are not of a high enough resolution to permit quality reproduction for publication purposes, they will be returned to the author.

Digital art (x-ray films, scans, and other diagnostic images, as well as pictures of pathology specimens or photomicrographs, should be sharp, glossy, black-and-white or color photographic prints) should be created/scanned and saved and submitted as either a TIFF (tagged image file format), an EPS (encapsulated postscript) file. 

Electronic photographs (radiographs, CT scans, and so on) and scanned images must have a resolution of at least 300 dpi. 

Color images must be created/scanned and saved and submitted as CMYK files. 

Diagrams and graphics in the Word editor can be created only in this editor.

If the pictures of people are used, they mustn’t be identified or must be accompanied by the signed informed consent to publish.

In the manuscript, legends for illustrations should be on a separate page, with Arabic numerals corresponding to the illustrations. 

When symbols, arrows, numbers, or letters are used to identify parts of the illustrations, identify and explain each one clearly in the legend. 

 

Units of Measurement

All the measurement should be reported in International System of Units (SI). 

Abbreviations and Symbols  

Abbreviations are not allowed except common chemical and mathematical abbreviations. Use only standard abbreviations. The spelled-out abbreviation followed by the abbreviation in parenthesis should be used on first mention unless the abbreviation is a standard unit of measurement. Avoid abbreviations in the title of the manuscript.

 

Submission of manuscripts

Journal of Ophthalmology (Ukraine) accept manuscripts through a special form on the journal’s website.

Several forms are required of all authors at the time a manuscript is submitted for publication:

1. Cover Letter

2. The Authorship Responsibility Form

3. Conflict of Interest Form OR ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

Cover Letter. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a cover letter or, which should include information indicating the following: 

The title of the manuscript and the names of the authors. 

Article type (review, research, case study, etc.) 

Brief description of the research you are reporting in your manuscript, why it is important, and why you think the readers of the journal would be interested in it. 

The originality of the manuscript. Include the statement that your paper has not been previously published and is not currently under consideration by another journal and that all authors have approved of and have agreed to submit the manuscript to this journal.

The prior or duplicate publication or submission. If the manuscript has been submitted previously to another journal, the manuscript must be accompanied by permission to reproduce previously published material, use previously published illustrations, report information about identifiable persons, or to acknowledge people for their contributions. The authors should indicate whether the manuscript was previously rejected or evaluated in any form by another journal, and they should describe specifically how they have improved the manuscript.

Pre-submission checklist. Ensure that all the components of the submission have been included using a pre-submission checklist.

1. Cover Letter 

2. The Authorship Responsibility Form

3. Potential Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form

4. A copy of the manuscript (a Microsoft Word file) including:

    1) Title page including:

a.Article title

b.Author information  

c.Corresponding author 

d.Author contribution

e.Acknowledgments

f.Disclaimers 

g.Source(s) of support 

h.Disclosure of relationships and activities

i.Abbreviations

 

j.Number of figures and tables 

   2) Abstract, limited to 200 words, with keywords

   3) Text of the manuscript formatted according to the instructions

   4) References

   5) Legends for illustrations

   6) Tables (Tables can be placed in the text either)

   7) Figures (properly formatted and labeled according to the instructions)