Submissions

AUTHOR GUIDELINES

Author Article:
Focus and Scope: NJOA invites original research papers, review articles, case reports, Integrative medicine, traditional knowledge, medical education, viewpoints letter to the authors containing new insight into any aspect of Health Sciences. The journal is particularly interested and welcomes literary, fundamental, clinical, drug, interdisciplinary research papers on Integrative medicines.

Editorial Article
It is written by NJOA editors or invited (Guest Editorial) on the most pertinent issues/context of Integrative Medicine. It undergoes a fast-track peer review process.

AUTHORS SHOULD FOLLOW
These paragraphs are mentioned for Basic terminology instructions and guide during submission.

Authorship:
Conflicting Interest:
Blinded Article file:
Data and Reproducibility:

Authorship:
The NJOA follows ICMJE recommendation for authorship - 4 authorship criteria:
Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; And
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; And
Final approval of the version to be published; And
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.

NJOA doesn't follow the order of naming the contributors based on the relative contribution of the contributor towards the study and writing the manuscript. All the contributors hold equal credits. Once submitted the order cannot be changed without the written consent of all the contributors. The journal prescribes a maximum number of authors for manuscripts depending upon the type of manuscript, its scope, and the number of institutions involved (vide infra). The authors should provide a justification if the number of authors exceeds these limits.

Corresponding author for NJOA: 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 typically ensures that all the journal's administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more co-authors. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way and should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication in NJOA.
Please visit: COPE Discussion document on what constitutes authorship?

Authors Conflicts of Interest/ Competing Interests
All authors must disclose all conflicts of interest during submission. Articles should be published with statements or supporting documents, such as the NJOA Declaration letter (includes conflict of interest statements), declaring:
Authors' conflicts of interest; and
Sources of support for the work, including sponsor names along with explanations of the role of those sources if any in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; the decision to submit the report for publication; or a statement declaring that the supporting source had no such involvement; and
Whether the authors had access to the study data, with an explanation of the nature and extent of access, including whether access is ongoing.

Blinded Article file:
To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this press, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:
The manuscript (abstract page and text) must not contain any mention of the authors' names or initials or the institution at which the study was done or acknowledgments. Article Title Page includes Manuscript Page headers/running title where the author can include the title, Author's info, and Correspondence includes Author detail. Manuscripts not in compliance with Journal's blinding policy will be returned to the corresponding author.
During Manuscript Submission, Title Page and Manuscript have to be separately uploaded. Templates from NJOA are prepared as according. Only Authors have to follow the NJOA Templates.
The authors of the document have to delete their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application: File > Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.
With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.

Data and Reproducibility:
NJOA requires, as a condition for publication, that the data supporting the results in the paper will be peer-reviewed and archived in an appropriate public repository. Authors are required to provide a data availability statement, including a link to the repository they have used, and to cite the data they have shared. Whenever possible the scripts and other artifacts used to generate the analyses presented in the paper will be publicly archived. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor. If sharing data compromise ethical standards or legal requirements then authors are not required to share it.
And: "Peer review of empirical data will be conducted to confirm the quality of the shared data, for example, the variables described in the article are present as fields in the data repository, that data is complete; that data is properly labeled and described; and that it has the appropriate metadata for the kind of data being shared."

The NJOA Editorial Process (Brief Information to Author)
The submitted manuscripts are duly acknowledged and initially reviewed for possible publication by the Editors with the understanding that they are being submitted only to the NJOA, have not been published, simultaneously submitted, or accepted for publication elsewhere.
Editorial Process Follows a. Submission Stage | b. Review Stage || c. Copyediting Stage || d. Production Stage

1. SUBMISSION STAGE
Condition: Rejection
Most of the submitted manuscript is rejected by the preliminary in-house review process, mostly due to lack of format/ templates [to avoid preliminary rejection, please go through submission guidelines in detail, follow them strictly and prepare your manuscript accordingly to NJOA].
On average, commonly the manuscripts with insufficient originality or insignificant message, serious scientific and technical flaws are rejected after peer review. However, we do encourage the author to resubmit after the revision if the research was conducted scientifically. The preliminary rejection of the manuscript is related to; manuscript being out of scope, the manuscript not formatted correctly, not following checklist and guidelines accurately, submission below publishable standards, incomplete submission (e.g. lack of ethical approval letter in condition mandatory for research article). The rejection could also be due to lack of originality, flaws in the methods section, generalizing and exaggerating the finding not supported by internal and external validity, peer reviewers' comments not adequately answered or unanswered, plagiarism, publication misconduct, and more. While declining the submission, we do not make comment on each aspect of the manuscript but give the reason for inadequate NJOA formatting, which means one or all of the above reasons.
If you follow the NJOA guideline in detail, you will find out the reason for the rejection. If you fail to pinpoint, we request you to consult a modern epidemiologist, methodologist, or medical statistician. Therefore, we request you to go through the author guideline in detail to avoid rejection of your submission.
We truly value your hard work and wish to publish most of the submissions to the NJOA. We have to maintain the highest standard of scientific values in our work to maintain quality. Therefore, we urge you to help us to improve scientific work together. We hope that the rejection of your current submission will not deter you to continue submitting your work to the NJOA.

2. REVIEW STAGE:
The Peer Review Process (Brief Information to Author)
The manuscripts after review from the Editorial Team are sent to two expert peer reviewers blinded to the contributor's identity and vice versa for meticulous review, inputs, and comments. The final decision on whether to accept or reject the article is taken by the Editor-in-Chief based on the editorial board and peer reviewers. The contributors are informed about the rejection/acceptance of the manuscript with the peer reviewer's comments. Accepted articles have to be resubmitted after making the necessary changes or clarifying questions made during the peer-review process.

3. COPYEDITING, PRODUCTION STAGES, AND DECISION TIME
The accepted articles from the Review stages are edited for grammatical, punctuation, print style and format errors, and page proofs and are sent to the corresponding author who should return them within a week (condition applied). Non-response to galley proof on this stage may result in the delay of publication or even rejection of the article.

Decision Time:
Time to first decision overall (average) within 3-5 days for initial decision (without review); 30-45 days (with the review). Those articles which have been submitted six months to a year ago undergo auto-pruning (automatic declining). It happens due to one of the following reasons i) to iii) or due to loss of contact with the authors.
If you find encounter delay and find no update on your NJOA submission account, which could be due to;
i) submission was incomplete or
ii) submission was without following NJOA format and supplementary documents or
iii) there is an issue with your submission (e.g. ethical issues or research misconduct or related)
Any issues or any other reasons, if you do not receive any information or update about your submission within 2-4 weeks, please contact NJOA as soon as possible. We will make sure that your voice is heard and addressed appropriately.
N.B. Please do not contact on personal email, social media, or phone number to Editor-in-Chief, Editorial team (except the mail and number provided on the website) related to your submission. All communication must be made via NJOA official email address only. NJOA best editorial practice ensures that it publishes the highest standard articles.

AUTHORS ARE ENCOURAGED
We encourage authors, to follow standard procedures - make a submission for manuscript authentication.
Standard reporting guidelines (standard reporting guidelines listed in Equator Network, Care guidelines for AYUSH related clinical cases)
Protocol submission: Center for Open Science.
Clinical trial registry (For clinical study).

Plagiarism Policy
Plagiarism detecting software (currently Grammarly software) is employed to check the originality of an article submitted to NJOA. The manuscript that is submitted is understood to be unpublished work and is not considered for publication elsewhere. Duplicate publication of the submitted manuscript in whole or in parts will be considered as a breach of plagiarism policy and is not welcome by the journal. NJOA follows instructions to prevent or handle plagiarism and benefit from higher levels of academic honesty. Best practices and advice for building academic integrity policies as per plagiarism.org are considered at the level of best.

Complaint Statement
For any concern or complaint regarding publication misconduct, please email at editor@yadon.org.np with your name, affiliation, address with phone number making HEADING TITLE: Complaint followed by subject matter. The privacy of the person will be maintained as long as legally permitted. According to the nature of the complaint, as per the NJOA Journal Policy and international rules and regulations, NJOA will take appropriate action.