Information For Authors
Interested in submitting to this journal? We recommend that you review the About the Journal page for the journal's section policies, as well as the Author Guidelines. Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting or, if already registered, can simply log in and begin the five-step process.
Publication Policies
IJCO accepts manuscripts in the following categories: original research articles, reviews, case reports, case series, brief communications, and artwork and images for the cover collage. Guest editorials and commentaries are invited by the editorial board.
Duplicate or redundant publication of a previously published peer-reviewed journal article is not allowed in IJCO—any such manuscript, if discovered to be published, will be retracted without notice and lead to an investigation by the editorial board, which may communicate with the institution or employer of the author(s). However, work published as part of a thesis/preprint/website/book/e-book chapter may be acceptable for publication. Editors should be made aware of any form of prior publication or presentation of the work presented in the manuscript. For all submissions, the plagiarism or similarity index should not exceed 10%, excluding the keywords, acknowledgements, and references.
Clinical trials, if submitted for publication, must be registered with one of the national or international Clinical Trials Registry platforms (e.g. Clinical Trials Registry of India [CTRI]).
Workflow
After an article is submitted, the receipt is acknowledged, and a technical check is performed for adherence to the author's guidelines. Articles that do not comply with the author's instructions are rejected at this stage. At this stage, if the plagiarism check of an article yields a similarity value greater than 10% (as above), the article may either be rejected or returned based on the decision of the technical editor.
A manuscript number is assigned once the files pass through a baseline technical check, and the submission is evaluated by the editorial board for subject relevance. A timely decision is taken to either reject or send the article to the reviewers. The authors are encouraged to suggest names of 3 reviewers at the time of submission (to be uploaded as a supplementary Word file [.docx]). A mix of reviewers from the journal panel and author-suggested names are requested to review the submission in a stipulated time frame.
The journal uses a double-blind peer-review system in which neither the author(s) nor the reviewer(s) know the others' identities. Identifying information within the blinded article file may lead to the rejection of the manuscript. The blinded article file is sent for double-blinded peer review.
After the editorial board receives at least two reviews from peers, a decision for minor revision, major revision, rejection, or acceptance is made. The authors are asked to reply pointwise to the queries (if any) raised by the reviewers and the editorial board. After the revised article is resubmitted, it is again sent for peer review for further evaluation. An article may need revision several times before a final decision can be made.
Accepted articles are copyedited for grammar and formatted. This document is sent to the authors for proofreading. Final modifications should be submitted within a stipulated time frame of 3 days only. Modifications after this time point might not be incorporated in the published version of the paper.
The journal editors reserve the right to edit the final version of the galley proof to comply with publication standards. The editor's final draft will not be forwarded for the author's approval and will be published in the journal.
Authorship Policies
Authors are considered according to ICMJE criteria for authorship: individuals listed as authors must have contributed to and agree with all of the following.
- 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 reviewing 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.
Individuals who meet all of these criteria should be identified as authors. If they don’t meet the criteria for authorship, they should be acknowledged as non-author contributors in the acknowledgements.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools should not be listed as authors. The specific use of AI for research, if any, should be mentioned in the methods, viz:
- Editorial work (writing, editing, translation)
- Referencing
- Design (making tables, figures, graphs, and photos); and/or
- Searching, classifying, analysing, or doing bibliographic studies.
If AI is used for writing assistance, details of the same have to be described in the acknowledgement section. (Source/further reading: please see WAME guidelines)
Authors must upload a Conflicts of Interest statement (available from ICMJE) as a supplementary file to all submissions.
Rules for additional authors
Following international standards, if more authors (than the number limited for each manuscript type) strictly fulfil the ICMJE criteria for authorship, the corresponding author should obtain prior approval of the editorial board (acoinjournal[at]gmail.com) for the same.
After the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue, any requests to add, delete, or rearrange author names in an article published in an online issue will follow the policies by COPE and ICMJE and result in a corrigendum if approved by the editorial boards. Such requests
Language and Grammar
Uniform American English is preferable. The full term for each abbreviation should be used at its first use in the title, abstract, keywords, and text separately, unless it is a standard unit of measure.
The manuscript should be free from spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. The use of online tools like the free Grammarly extension for Chrome or the use of AI to improve spelling, grammar, and language is permissible.
Article processing fee/charge
The journal (IJCO) does not charge any article processing fee/colour image/figure charges for publication of an accepted manuscript. All the articles are open access and freely available online.
