Author Guidelines
East African Journal of
Arthroscopy and Sports Medicine (EAJASM)
EAJASM MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
The East African Journal of Arthroscopy and Sports Medicine (EAJASM) is an open access publication of the East African Arthroscopy Association (EAAA). Authors submitting manuscripts to EAJASM do so on the understanding that if accepted they surrender all copyright to the journal. No part of this journal may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the Editor-in-Chief.
The editor of EAJASM, Everisto Opondo, can be contacted via e-mail at everisto@eajasm.org. Manuscripts must not be under simultaneous consideration by any other publication, before or during the peer-review process, and cannot be uploaded to any preprint server. Articles published in EAJASM may not be published elsewhere without written permission from the publisher.
Manuscripts should cite any other work by one or more of the co-authors that is relevant to the subject matter of the current submission or that used any of the same subjects, animals, or specimens being reported in the current submission. This includes manuscripts that are currently under preparation, are being considered by journals, are accepted for publication, or already published. In any of these cases, the relationship to the current submission should be made clear.
SUBMISSIONS
Authors should register on our online submission site to submit manuscripts. When manuscripts have been received by the editorial office, the corresponding author will be sent an acknowledgment giving an assigned manuscript number, which should be used with all subsequent correspondence for anything related to that particular manuscript. The following items are required on submission:
1. Journal Contributor Publishing Agreement and EAJASM Author Disclosure Statement. These forms are available for download from the Author Area of the submission site. The corresponding author must complete the forms on behalf of all coauthors and return them to EAJASM by e-mail or upload them online as a PDF or Word file using the ‘‘upload legal documents’’ option.
All legal forms must be submitted with a handwritten (not typed) signature. As an alternative to the EAJASM disclosure form, authors may submit the ICMJE disclosure form along with the EAJASM Supplemental Form available on our website.
The EAJASM will check author disclosures against the Open Payments Database. Any combined payments listed over Ksh 50,000/year from a single company should be included. Authors should include payments from the previous 5 years.
2. A copy of the IRB or other agency approval (or waiver) if animal subjects or human subjects or tissues or health information were used.
3. The original study protocol for all registered clinical trials must be included and can be uploaded as a supplemental file. The protocol information from the registration site or the formal protocol for the study design are acceptable. Use of a CONSORT flow diagram is required to illustrate the grouping and flow of patients for all randomized clinical trials. The CONSORT checklist must also be completed and uploaded as a supplemental file.
Authors may be asked to supply full supporting data for their study. If the author refuses this request, the paper will be rejected without further review. Cover letter, acknowledgments, and suggested reviewers are optional.
If a paper has more than 5 authors, a cover letter detailing the contributions of all authors should be included in the appropriate box on the submission page. Only those involved in writing the paper should be included in the author line. Others should be listed as a footnote or acknowledgment.
While there is no limit on the number of authors, no more than 12 will be listed on the masthead of the published article; additional authors will be listed at the end of the article.
MANUSCRIPT FORMATS
Manuscript pages should be double-spaced with consecutive page numbers and continuous line numbers. The abstract should be included with the manuscript as well as being entered in the Metadata section (except for case reports, which do not require abstracts). There are no limitations on figures, tables, and references.
The system handles most common word processing formats; however, MS Word files for text and Word or Excel tables are preferred.
MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION
Abstract
Abstracts should summarize the contents of the article in 350 words or less. The abstract should be structured in the following format:
Background: In one or two sentences, summarize the scientific body of knowledge surrounding your study and how this led to your investigation.
Hypothesis/Purpose: State the theory(ies) that you are attempting to prove or disprove by your study or the purpose if no hypothesis exists.
Study Design: Identify the overall design of your study. See list below of the acceptable study designs.
Methods: Succinctly summarize the overall methods you used in your investigation. Include the study population, type of intervention, method of data collection, and length of the study. Results: Report the most important results of your study. Only include positive results that are statistically significant, or important negative results that are supported by adequate power. Report actual data, not just P values.
Conclusion: State the answer to your original question or hypothesis. Summarize the most important conclusions that can be directly drawn from your study.
Clinical Relevance: If yours was a laboratory study, describe its relevance to clinical sports medicine.
Key Terms: Provide at least 4 key words for indexing.
Study Designs that will be published
Meta-analysis: A systematic overview of studies that pools results of two or more studies to obtain an overall answer to a question or interest. Summarizes quantitatively the evidence regarding a treatment, procedure, or association.
Systematic Review: An article that examines published material on a clearly described subject in a systematic way. There must be a description of how the evidence on this topic was tracked down, from what sources and with what inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial: A group of patients is randomized into an experimental group and a control group. These groups are followed up for the variables / outcomes of interest.
Crossover Study Design: The administration of two or more experimental therapies one after the other in a specified or random order to the same group of patients.
Cohort Study: Involves identification of two groups (cohorts) of patients, one which did receive the exposure of interest, and one which did not, and following these cohorts forward for the outcome of interest.
Case-Control Study: A study that involves identifying patients who have the outcome of interest (cases) and patients without the same outcome (controls), and looking back to see if they had the exposure of interest.
Cross-Sectional Study: The observation of a defined population at a single point in time or time interval. Exposure simultaneously and outcome are simultaneously determined.
Case Series: Describes characteristics of a group of patients with a particular disease or who have undergone a particular procedure. Design may be prospective or retrospective. No control group is used in the study, although the discussion may compare the results to other published outcomes.
Case Report: Similar to the case series, except that only one or a small group of cases is reported.
Descriptive Epidemiology Study: Observational study describing the injuries occurring in a particular sport.
Controlled Laboratory Study: An in vitro or in vivo investigation in which 1 group receiving an experimental treatment is compared to 1 or more groups receiving no treatment or an alternate treatment.
Descriptive Laboratory Study: An in vivo or in vitro study that describes characteristics such as anatomy, physiology, or kinesiology of a broad range of subjects or a specific group of interest. Authors should choose the design that best fits the study.
The Editor will make the final determination of the study design and level of evidence based on the Center for Evidence Based Medicine guidelines.
Text Specification
In general, follow the standard IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) format for writing scientific articles.
The author is responsible for all statements made in the work, including copyeditor changes, which the author will have an opportunity to verify. Authors with limited fluency in English should have the paper reviewed or edited by a native English speaker to ensure clear presentation of the work. Papers including human or animal subjects must include a statement of approval by appropriate agencies in the text, and a copy of the approval letter must be uploaded with the submission.
If approval was not required, authors must upload a waiver statement from the appropriate agency.
Additionally, all studies with human subjects must include the date range for enrollment in the study. For retrospective studies, please include the date of treatment. For human cadaveric specimens, please provide source (eg, donation to university anatomy program) and state if permission was obtained for use. Additionally, all studies involving animals must conform to ARRIVE guidelines. If available, please include the source of animal joint or tissue specimens. For case reports, a letter from the patient granting permission for his/her information to be included in the publication is required.
Reports on surgery, except in rare instances, require a minimum follow-up of 2 years. Use generic names of drugs or devices. If a particular brand was used in a study, insert the brand name along with the name and location of the manufacturer in parentheses after the generic name when the drug or device is first mentioned in the text.
Use metric units in measurements (centimeter vs inch, kilo- gram vs pound).
Abbreviations should be used sparingly. When abbreviations are used, give the full term followed by the abbreviation in parentheses the first time it is mentioned in the text.
Use of a CONSORT flow diagram is required to illustrate the grouping and flow of patients in all randomized controlled trials and is recommended for all other types of clinical studies.
Statistical methods should be described in detail. Actual P values should be used unless less than 0.001. Reporting of 95% confidence intervals is encouraged.
Acknowledgment
Give credit to technical assistants, professional colleagues and implant companies that contributed to the quality of the paper but are not listed as authors. Please briefly describe the contributions made by persons being acknowledged.
References
References should be double-spaced in alphabetical order by the last name of the first author and numbered according to alphabetical listing. References should be in the Vancour format. Not more than 40 references for original papers and 20 for case reviews. When author entries are the same, alphabetize by the first word of the title.
Note: References must be retrievable. Published papers and papers published on preprint servers can be listed in the reference list.
Do not include in the reference list meeting presentations that have not been published. Personal communications and other references to unpublished data are discouraged.
For review purposes, unpublished references that are closely related to the submitted paper or are important for understanding it should be uploaded as blinded supplemental files. References will be linked to Medline citations for the reviewers.
Authors can include articles that are in e-publish mode by including the article’s DOI (digital object identifier): Noyes FR, Barber-Westin SD. Arthroscopic repair of meniscus tears extending into the avascular zone with or without anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction in patients 40 years of age and older. Arthroscopy. 2000;16(8):822–829. doi: 10.1053/jars.2000.19434.
Figures and Tables
Any material that is submitted with an article that has been reproduced from another source (that is, has been copyrighted previously) must conform to the current copyright regulations. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain written permission for reproduction of copyrighted material and for providing the editorial office with that documentation before the material will be reproduced in the Journal.
Be sure to include figure legends in the text. The figure legend should include descriptions of each figure part and identify the meaning of any symbols or arrows. Terms used for labels and in the legend must be consistent with those in the text. A CONSORT flow diagram should be included for all randomized clinical trials to illustrate the grouping and flow of patients.
Authors are encouraged to submit their figures in color, as there is an unlimited use of color in the Journal.
Figures for papers accepted for publication must meet the image resolution requirements of the publisher, SAGE Publications. Files for line-based drawings (no grayscale) should ideally be submitted in the format they were originally created; if submitting scanned versions, files should be 1200 dots per inch (dpi). Color photos should be submitted at 600 dpi and black-and-white photos at 300 dpi.
Charts and graphs should whenever possible be submitted in the original form created (eg, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint).
Photographs or scanned drawings embedded in Word or PowerPoint, while acceptable for review, are not acceptable for publication. If figures are embedded in the submitted manuscript for ease of reading, they should also be submitted as separate files for use in the publication process.
All photographs of patients that disclose their identity must be accompanied by a signed photographic release granting permission for their likeness to be reproduced in the article. If this is not provided, the patient’s eyes must be occluded to prevent recognition.
For tables, the system accepts most common word processing formats. Tables should be numbered consecutively and have a title that describes the content and purpose of the table. Tables should enhance, not duplicate, information in the text.
Videos
Use of supplementary video is encouraged. Videos may be submitted with a manuscript and, if approved by the editor, will be posted online with the article when published. Video submission is strongly encouraged for manuscripts reporting surgical, examination, or exercise techniques or injury mechanisms. For videos with identifiable subjects, subjects will need to sign the Audio-Visual Likeness Release form. It is the author’s responsibility to submit signed release forms, if necessary, for each video.
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS
Once an article is accepted and typeset, authors will be required to carefully read and correct their manuscript proofs that have been copyedited by the publisher. Authors are responsible for ordering reprints of their articles. No corrections can be made after online publication, including corrections to author names and affiliations. All corrections must be made at the proofing stage.
Letters to the Editor Letters to the editor
The author disclosure form and contributor publishing agreement are required for letters to the editor.