The IJMP editorial policies covers editorial policies, as well as general information about the editorial and publishing processes.
The editorial policy of our journals is based on the ethics statements of the Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE's Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.
Publication decisions
The editor is responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published.
The editor may be guided by the policies of the journal's editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. The editor may confer with other editors or reviewers in making this decision.
Fair play
An editor at any time evaluates manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.
Confidentiality
The editor and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor's own research without the express written consent of the author.
Plagiarism Detection
Iranian Journal of Medical Physics (IJMP) uses iThenticate for plagiarism screening and verifying the originality of content submitted before publication. All accepted manuscripts will be checked once again by editorial staff before final step of publishing.
All manuscript scientifically accepted to publish will be checked in IJMP editorial office. In this process, iThenticate provides us with a similarity report listing (a) the percentage of similarity resulting from counted words and (b) the markup of the various sections, expressions, or terms which were found in other documents.
We check the similarity report and, if applicable, the report will be uploaded into the IJMP Office Editor to be shown to the editor of the respective manuscript. The decision of whether or not a manuscript should be rejected because of fraud or proceed to publish rests with the editor-in-chief.
Duties of reviewers
Contribution to editorial decisions
Peer review assists the editor in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the paper.
Promptness
Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself from the review process.
Confidentiality
Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be shown to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.
Standards of objectivity
Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Referees should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.
Acknowledgment of sources
Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also call to the editor's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.
Duties of authors
Reporting standards
Authors of reports of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.
Data Access and retention
Authors are asked to provide the raw data in connection with a paper for editorial review, and should be prepared to provide public access to such data (consistent with the ALPSP-STM Statement on Data and Databases), if practicable, and should, in any event, be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable time after publication.
Originality and plagiarism
The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.
Multiple, redundant, or concurrent publication
An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.
Acknowledgment of sources
Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work.
Authorship of the Paper
Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors.
The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.
Hazards and human or animal subjects
If the work involves chemicals, procedures, or equipment that have any unusual hazards inherent in their use, the author must clearly identify these in the manuscript.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.
Fundamental errors in published works
When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author's obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper.
Article retraction
In the event that ethical misconduct (e.g., misrepresentation/falsification of data, pervasive errors, plagiarism, multiple submission, etc.) is determined to have occurred in a manuscript published in IJMP, we reserve the right to issue a public retraction of the manuscript in question. The retraction will come in the form of a note published in a subsequent issue of the journal. The article's citation will be labeled as "Retracted" in all databases and the electronic version of the manuscript file will be clearly marked as "Retracted."
Reprint policy
Any unauthorized use of the Content may violate copyright laws, trademark laws, and other applicable laws. Please referee to the: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. According to the License, you can:
• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material