AJODS adheres to international standards of research and publication ethics. All submissions must comply with the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE; www.icmje.org) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE; publicationethics.org).
1. REPORTING GUIDELINES
Authors must prepare manuscripts in accordance with the relevant reporting guideline for their study design and submit the completed checklist alongside the manuscript:
- Randomized controlled trials — CONSORT
- Observational studies — STROBE
- Systematic reviews and meta-analyses — PRISMA
- Studies on diagnostic accuracy — STARD
- Case reports — CARE
- Experimental animal studies — ARRIVE
For study designs not listed above, authors are encouraged to consult the EQUATOR Network to identify the appropriate reporting guideline.
2. ETHICS COMMITTEE APPROVAL
Ethics committee approval is mandatory for all studies involving human participants, animals, or identifiable personal data, including:
- Research collecting data via surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, or experiments
- Studies using human subjects, human tissue, biological samples, or identifiable data
- Clinical trials conducted on humans
- Animal experiments — must also comply with ARRIVE guidelines (arriveguidelines.org)
- Retrospective studies involving personal health data
In the Materials and Methods section, authors must state the full name of the ethics committee, the approval/decision number, and the approval date. Studies lacking proper ethics documentation will not be evaluated.
3. DECLARATION OF HELSINKI
All clinical research involving human participants must be conducted in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (wma.net). This must be stated explicitly in the Methods section.
4. PATIENT PRIVACY & INFORMED CONSENT
If any photograph, radiograph, or image allows patient identification, written consent from the patient or legal guardian must be submitted to the editorial office as a separate file. In the absence of consent, images must be altered to prevent identification (e.g. eye bars, facial cropping). For case reports, a statement confirming that written informed consent was obtained must appear in both the abstract and the Case Report section.
5. PLAGIARISM POLICY
Each manuscript must be screened for plagiarism using detection software (iThenticate, Turnitin, or equivalent) prior to submission, and a full similarity report must be uploaded as a separate file. The overall similarity rate must be below 20% (excluding references, tables, and standard methodology expressions), with no single source exceeding 5%. Manuscripts exceeding these limits may be rejected at the editorial stage without peer review; all accepted manuscripts are independently re-screened by the editorial office.
6. AUTHORSHIP
Authorship must be based on all four ICMJE criteria:
- Substantial contributions to conception or design, or acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data
- Drafting the work or critically revising it for important intellectual content
- Final approval of the version to be published
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work
Persons who contributed but do not meet all four criteria should be listed in the Acknowledgements. Changes to authorship after submission require written justification from all authors and approval by the Editor-in-Chief.
7. GENERATIVE AI DISCLOSURE
Authors must disclose the use of any generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini) in manuscript preparation. AI tools may not be listed as authors. Disclosure must be provided on the Title Page, specifying the tool name and version, manufacturer, date(s) of use, purpose, and the sections of the manuscript affected. If no AI tools were used, authors must state this explicitly.
8. CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Authors must disclose any financial, personal, or professional relationships that could influence the research, including patents, stock ownership, consultancies, speaker fees, and employment relationships with companies whose products are discussed. Conflict of interest declarations must appear on the Title Page and at the end of the main manuscript.
9. DATA AVAILABILITY
A Data Availability Statement must be included in the manuscript, indicating whether and how the underlying data can be accessed. If data cannot be shared publicly, a brief justification should be provided.
10. PEER REVIEW PROCESS
All manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review by at least two independent expert reviewers. The Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision on acceptance or rejection.
- Editorial pre-check: the editorial office performs an initial check for completeness of required documents, formatting compliance, plagiarism screening, and appropriateness for the journal's scope. Manuscripts failing these checks will be returned without peer review.
- Review outcomes: manuscripts passing pre-check are assigned to at least two independent reviewers. If one reviewer recommends acceptance and another rejection, a third reviewer is consulted. Possible outcomes: accept without revision, accept with minor revisions, major revision (resubmission required), or reject.
- Revision policy: authors submitting a revision must return the manuscript within 60 days, highlight all changes using a different font colour, and submit a point-by-point response letter addressing each reviewer and editor comment. AJODS will generally not review more than three revisions of the same manuscript.
- Editorial team submissions: when a manuscript is submitted by an editorial team member, that editor is excluded from all stages of the peer review process; such manuscripts are handled exclusively by an independent editor, in accordance with COPE guidelines on editorial conflicts of interest.
11. COPYRIGHT & OPEN ACCESS
AJODS is an open-access journal. Authors retain copyright of their work, and all content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. This licence permits others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original work is properly cited, no modifications or derivative works are created, and no commercial use is made without prior written permission from the authors. No article processing charge (APC) is applied for submission or publication. Authors may self-archive the submitted, accepted, or published version of their manuscript in institutional or subject repositories at any time, without embargo. If the manuscript includes material reproduced from other copyrighted sources, it is the authors' responsibility to obtain the necessary permissions prior to submission.