For Authors

All submissions are made online only, through this website (psimj.com). Nothing is submitted on paper. Choose your submission type (review article, systematic review/meta-analysis, original article, short report, case report, editorial, letter to the editor or reflections), register or log in, and follow the submission steps.

Every manuscript must be accompanied by a covering letter from the author responsible for correspondence. State the submission type in your cover letter.

By submitting, the authors confirm that any human or animal studies behind the manuscript followed the regulations of their institution(s) and generally accepted guidelines for such work, and that all financial or other relationships that could be construed as a conflict of interest, and all sources of financial support, have been disclosed. This declaration is part of the signed Letter of Authorship (see below), signed by all co-authors.

All authors must fulfil the ICMJE authorship criteria and state their individual contributions during the online submission, using the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) roles for original research and review articles. Each author must have made: (1) a substantial contribution to the conception, design, acquisition, analysis or interpretation of the work; (2) a contribution to drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (3) given final approval of the version to be published; and (4) agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work, ensuring that questions about its accuracy or integrity are appropriately investigated and resolved. If any part of the work has been published before, this must be acknowledged and written permission to reuse it included.

Declare any use of artificial-intelligence tools in preparing the manuscript, and keep a record of the prompts used, as described in the Ethical Compliance policy.

Fees. A submission fee and a processing fee are payable together, by bank deposit, when you submit. The current amounts, the bank account, the refund rules and the waiver policy are set out on the Article Processing Charges (APC) page.

Submitted manuscripts are reviewed for originality, significance, adequacy of documentation, reader interest and composition. Every submission is first assessed by the editorial staff for:

• fit with the scope of the journal and the technical quality of the research presented;
• completeness of the submission, including authorship information, disclosures, ethical documentation and reporting requirements;
• plagiarism and text overlap: JPSIM screens all submissions with Turnitin similarity-detection software, and its screening threshold is an overall similarity of no more than 19%;
• language, spelling, grammar and reference formatting, which remain the responsibility of the authors. Raw data may be requested to verify originality, and authorship information will be checked.

Manuscripts that pass this assessment are sent for double-blind peer review by at least two reviewers, one from the subject specialty and the other preferably from a research background. As per HEC guidelines, articles are sent to national and international reviewers. Commissioned editorials are the exception: they are written by editorial board members or requested from subject experts and receive a preliminary review within the editorial board (see Peer Review).

After receiving the reviewers’ comments, the Editor or Editor-in-Chief will take one of these decisions:

• accept, with or without editorial revisions;
• invite the author(s) to revise the manuscript as suggested by the reviewers before a final decision;
• reject, but indicate that further work may justify resubmission;
• reject outright, giving reasons such as lack of novelty, insufficient conceptual advance or major technical or interpretive problems.

All accepted manuscripts are edited for scientific accuracy and clarity by the editorial office.

Manuscripts must be written in English. If there is any doubt about the language, authors should seek the help of an experienced English-speaking medical editor, who should review the final draft of the original and of any revision.

Upload the manuscript as a Word file (.doc or .docx), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman or Arial, with pages numbered consecutively. Begin with the abstract, then the introduction, methodology, results, discussion, acknowledgements, references, and tables and figures with their legends. Tables and figures may be placed after the references or uploaded as separate files.

Because review is double-blind, the manuscript file must not contain the authors’ names, affiliations or acknowledgements, and self-identifying citations should be minimised. The title page is uploaded as a separate file (see below).

The title page should include: (1) a concise and informative title of fewer than 200 characters (for a case report, the title should include the words “case report” or “a case report”); (2) the full name of each author, with the ORCID iD of every author where available; (3) the complete affiliation of each author, with department(s), institution(s), city and country; (4) a disclaimer, if any; and (5) the name, address, telephone number and email address of the one author responsible for correspondence. A sample is shown at the end of this page.

Original articles need a structured abstract of not more than 250 words, labelled Background & Objectives, Methodology, Results and Conclusion, briefly describing the problem addressed, how the study was done, the main results and what the authors conclude. Review articles, systematic reviews and meta-analyses need an unstructured abstract of 150–200 words that states the methods used. Case reports and short reports may carry an unstructured abstract of up to 150 words. Keywords are listed separately below the abstract, not as part of it. Editorials, letters and reflections need no abstract.

Provide 3 to 6 keywords, adhering to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).

State the purpose of the article and summarise the rationale for the study or observation. Give only strictly pertinent references, and do not include data or conclusions from the work being reported.

Describe the selection of the observational or experimental subjects (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) clearly, and identify their age, sex and other important characteristics. The definition and relevance of race and ethnicity are ambiguous, and authors should be particularly careful in using these categories.

Identify the methods, apparatus (give the manufacturer’s name and address in parentheses) and procedures in enough detail for other workers to reproduce the results. Give references to established methods, including statistical methods; give references and brief descriptions for methods that are published but not well known; and describe new or substantially modified methods, giving reasons for their use and evaluating their limitations. Identify precisely all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s) and route(s) of administration.

Reports of randomised clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol (study population, interventions or exposures, outcomes and the rationale for the statistical analysis), the assignment of interventions (methods of randomisation and concealment of allocation) and the method of masking (blinding). Follow the relevant reporting guideline: CONSORT for trials, STROBE for observational studies and PRISMA for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. A formal narrative review may be submitted, but JPSIM prefers systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

When reporting experiments on human subjects, state whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Declaration of Helsinki as currently revised, and whether informed consent was obtained. Do not use patients’ names, initials or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. When reporting experiments on animals, state whether the institution’s or a national research council’s guide for, or any national law on, the care and use of laboratory animals was followed (ARRIVE reporting is encouraged). See also the Human and Animal Research Ethics policy.

Describe statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data 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 quantitative information. Give details about randomisation, describe the method for and the success of any blinding of observations, report complications of treatment, give numbers of observations and report losses to observation (such as dropouts from a clinical trial). Specify any general-use computer programs used.

Put a general description of methods in the methods section. When data are summarised in the results section, specify the statistical methods used to analyse them. Restrict tables and figures to those needed to explain the argument of the paper and to assess its support. Use graphs as an alternative to tables with many entries, and do not duplicate data in graphs and tables. Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as “random”, “normal”, “significant”, “correlation” and “sample”, and define statistical terms, abbreviations and most symbols.

Present your results in logical sequence in the text, tables and illustrations. Do not repeat in the text all the data in the tables or illustrations; emphasise or summarise only the important observations.

Emphasise the new and important aspects of the study and the conclusions that follow from them. Do not repeat in detail data or other material given in the introduction or the results. Include the implications of the findings and their limitations, including implications for future research, and relate the observations to other relevant studies.

Link the conclusions with the goals of the study, but avoid unqualified statements and conclusions not completely supported by the data. Avoid statements on economic benefits and costs unless the manuscript includes economic data and analyses. Avoid claiming priority and alluding to work that has not been completed. State new hypotheses when warranted, but label them clearly. Recommendations, when appropriate, may be included.

People who contributed intellectually to the paper but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be named, with their function or contribution described — for example “scientific advisor”, “critical review of study proposal”, “data collection” or “participation in clinical trial”. Such people must have given permission to be named, and authors are responsible for obtaining their written permission, because readers may infer their endorsement of the data and conclusions. Technical help should be acknowledged in a paragraph separate from other contributions. Acknowledgements are not included in the blinded manuscript file.

JPSIM uses Vancouver style (the ICMJE / U.S. National Library of Medicine format). Cite references in consecutive numerical order of first mention in the text, using superscript reference numbers. References that appear only in a table or figure are numbered in sequence with those in the text. List all authors when there are six or fewer; for more than six, list the first six followed by “et al.” Use standard abbreviated journal names. Do not cite “unpublished observations” or “personal communications”; written (not verbal) communications may be noted in the text. A reference cited as “in press” must have been accepted, not merely be in preparation or submitted.

The accuracy and integrity of the references are the sole responsibility of the authors, and errors or non-compliance may delay review and publication.

Journal article:

Waqar SN, Hussain H, Khan R, Khawaja A, Majid H, Malik S, et al. Intestinal parasitic infections in children from Northern Pakistan. Infect Dis J. 2003;12(3):73-7.

Online article (add the DOI after the year):

Page MJ, McKenzie JE, Bossuyt PM, Boutron I, Hoffmann TC, Mulrow CD, et al. The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ. 2021;372:n71. doi:10.1136/bmj.n71

Book chapter:

DeGroot IJ. Evaluation of thyroid function and thyroid disease. In: DeGroot L, Stanbury JB, editors. The thyroid and its diseases. 4th ed. New York: Wiley; 1975. p. 196-248.

Conference proceedings:

Kimura J, Shibasaki H, editors. Recent advances in clinical neurophysiology. Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of EMG and Clinical Neurophysiology; 1995 Oct 15-19; Kyoto, Japan. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 1996.

Dissertation:

Kaplan SJ. Post-hospital home health care: the elderly’s access and utilization [dissertation]. St. Louis (MO): Washington University; 1995.

Journal volume with supplement:

Shen HM, Zhang QF. Risk assessment of nickel carcinogenicity and occupational lung cancer. Environ Health Perspect. 1994;102(Suppl 1):275-82.

Except for units of measurement, abbreviations are discouraged. When an abbreviation is used, it should be preceded by the full word or name at first use.

Generic names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in the research, include the brand name in parentheses in the methods section.

Type each table double-spaced. Do not submit tables as images of tables or photographs. Tables should be self-explanatory and should supplement, not duplicate, the text. Cite each table in consecutive numerical order in the text and number the tables consecutively with an Arabic number following the word “Table”. Titles should be descriptive and brief. Do not use vertical lines, and give each column a short or abbreviated heading.

Place explanatory matter in footnotes, not in the heading, using the symbols *, †, ‡, §, in that sequence. Expand all non-standard abbreviations in the footnote, and identify statistical measures of variation, such as standard deviation or standard error of the mean. If data from another published source are used, obtain written permission from the publisher of the original source and acknowledge it fully; if data from an unpublished source are used, obtain permission from the principal investigator and acknowledge it fully.

Illustrations should clarify and augment the text. Submit them as high-quality digital image files, uploaded through the online submission system; figures of inferior quality will be returned for correction or replacement. Do not submit prints or original artwork. Lettering, numbers and symbols must be clear and of sufficient size to remain legible after reduction. Number each illustration and cite it in consecutive order in the text. No hand-drawn art will be accepted.

Originally published illustrations are not preferred; if a previously published illustration is used, the author is responsible for obtaining written permission from the publisher to reprint it. The source of the original material must be cited in the references and the credit line “(Reprinted by permission of Ref. X)” included in the legend. All permission releases must be submitted to the Editor with the manuscript.

Legends should be concise and should not repeat the text. Type them double-spaced after the references or with the figure. Give each figure a number following the word “Figure”. Use letters to designate parts of illustrations (A, B, C) and describe each part clearly. Any letters or arrows appearing on the illustration should be identified and described fully.

• Editorials: usually commissioned, but unsolicited editorials of up to 1,000 words are welcome. Commissioned editorials are reviewed within the editorial board; unsolicited editorials are externally reviewed.
• Original article: up to 3,500 words excluding title page and structured abstract, with no more than three tables, three figures and 25 references.
• Review article / Systematic review / Meta-analysis: up to 4,500 words excluding title page and abstract, with no more than 35 references.
• Short reports: up to 2,000 words excluding title page. A short introduction, patients, methods and results are written together, followed by the discussion. No more than two tables, two figures and 10 references.
• Case report: up to 2,000 words. Short introduction, case report and discussion. No more than two tables, two figures and 10 references. Case reports must follow the CARE reporting guideline, and the title should include the words “case report”. Authors must obtain written informed consent for publication from the patient (or from a parent, guardian or next of kin where the patient cannot consent) and state this in the manuscript; the consent statement is published on the article page.
• Letters to the Editor: up to 400 words, with no more than five references, one figure and one table, and no more than three authors. Letters about a recent journal article must be received within four weeks of its publication.
• Reflections: based on true stories of patients or medical professionals; 1,500–2,000 words. A picture of the narrator is required.

Every manuscript must be submitted with the journal’s “Letter of Authorship” (authorship declaration) form, signed by all authors. Scan or photograph the signed form and upload it during the online submission. No article will be processed without it.

An approval letter from the Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board is required with each research submission to JPSIM. Upload it with the manuscript; no research paper can be published without it.

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

8. Title, authors and affiliations on the (separate) title page should follow the sample below.

Intestinal Parasitic Infections in Children from Northern Pakistan. Muhammad Abbas Khan¹, Farhat Rasheed², Abdul Ghani², Afzal Qureshi¹

¹Department of Medicine, King Edward Medical University, Lahore, Pakistan; ²Department of Internal Medicine, Services Institute of Medical Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan

9. All references must be in Vancouver style, as in the sample below.

Waqar SN, Hussain H, Khan R, Khawaja A, Majid H, Malik S, et al. Intestinal parasitic infections in children from Northern Pakistan. Infect Dis J. 2003;12(3):73-7.