Submissions

Author Guidelines

Guidelines for authors

Paper submission policy and standards

GENERAL

The Cuban Journal of Health Sciences Information (formerly ACIMED) is a scientific periodical managed by the National Medical Sciences Information Center. It publishes information science papers dealing with biomedical and health topics.

The Journal uses an online editorial management system (Open Journal System). Accordingly, prior registration with the Journal's website (http://rcics.sld.cu), authors should upload their papers upon declaration of compliance with a number of compulsory requirements. From that moment onwards, authors will be able to follow up the status of their contributions on the same platform, from which they will also receive various notifications throughout the editorial process.

The peer review system used by the Journal is totally anonymous both for the author and for the reviewer (double-blind review). This external evaluation process is carried out by experts assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript submitted. Their views are sent to the editor, who will decide upon publication of the manuscript. If considered appropriate, their suggestions will be submitted to the author with a view to improving the quality of the paper. This process may be repeated as many times as required.

It must be underlined that documents submitted by authors will be treated as confidential throughout the evaluation process. Only in case the paper is accepted for publication will its content be communicated to third parties. Consequently, peer reviewers and editors should abstain from telling anyone outside the Editorial Committee about any aspect of a paper under their consideration.

To upload a paper, the author should make an explicit declaration of his/her conflicts of interests, if any, or of the non-existence of such conflicts. For more information, see the editorial Conflict of interest statement by authors in scientific journals, recently published by the Journal.

On the other hand, the Journal adheres to contemporary trends towards avoiding "editorial endogamy" as much as possible. Editorial endogamy is a negative practice incurred by publications when one fourth or more of the contributions include a member of the Editorial Committee among their co-authors.

SECTIONS OF THE JOURNAL

The following sections make up the Cuban Journal of Health Sciences Information (see a description of each in Section policy):

Editorial

Papers

• Original research papers
• Review papers
• Theoretical-methodological papers

Editor's note

Short contributions

Permanent education

Obituary

Letters to the editor

Current events

Reviews

GUIDELINES FOR THE SUBMISSION OF ORIGINAL PAPERS

An original paper is one which has not been published in any way by their author or by any other person, nor is it being considered for publication by another journal or means of scientific communication. The author should explicitly declare their compliance with this requirement.

1.      Structure

Papers will consist of the following sections:

• TITLE
• ABSTRACT
• KEY WORDS
• INTRODUCTION
• MAIN BODY
• CONCLUSIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

THE ABSTRACT, of the informative type, will consist in a single paragraph written in an impersonal style. It will contain the objectives of the study, the methods used, and a brief description of the main results and conclusions. These contents will be implicitly included in the paragraph, not set off in separate headings. The Abstract will not exceed 250 words.

Three to ten KEY WORDS or PHRASES will be included to facilitate indexation of the paper. Authors should make sure that the key words or phrases selected can be found in the list of health sciences descriptors. This may be verified consulting DeCS .

The INTRODUCTION will include the theoretical framework of the study, as well as clear reference to the contribution intended to be conveyed (questions to be answered or hypotheses considered, when relevant). The objective of the study will be stated at the end of this section.

The MAIN BODY will have a flexible structure depending on the kind of communication and as long as elementary coherence rules are complied with. It may be split into subsections if the author so wishes. Subsections could be METHOD and RESULTS if need be, but such a structure will not be compulsory since many theoretical, conceptual, reflection, review or didactic papers do not adjust to that classic structure, applicable to research papers based on empirical data obtained by the researcher.

The CONCLUSIONS will derive from the paper itself (occasionally certain statements will be included which are accurate but do not stem from the study conducted), and will not repeat the results achieved but be genuine developments synthesizing the results obtained by the study. Bibliographic references will not appear in this section. Conclusions will not be bulleted.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES will follow the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals and be numbered in the same order as they appear in the text.

Subheadings will be written in a bigger font size than the rest of the text.

2.      Format and length

Papers should be written in Microsoft Word format, with tables and figures inserted at the place where they belong in the text. The maximum number of tables and figures acceptable is five each. Occasionally, if the paper is accepted for publication, editors may ask authors to submit the figures and tables separately in a specific format. Papers will not exceed 6 000 words, including the title, bibliographic references, tables and charts.