Editorial Policies
Editorial policies
Paediatrics & Child Health conforms to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals.
Manuscripts are received with the understanding that they are submitted solely to Paediatrics & Child Health, and that none of the material contained in the manuscript has been previously published or is under consideration for publication elsewhere, with the exception of abstracts.
Authorship
Authorship is limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the design and execution of the work described. Any contributors whose participation does not meet the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged but not listed as an author.
The Journal does not allow ghost authorship, where an unnamed author prepares the article with no credit, or guest/gift authorship, where an author who made little or no contribution is listed as an author. The Journal follows Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidance on investigating and resolving these cases. For more information, please see the OUP Publication Ethics page.
Natural language processing tools driven by artificial intelligence (AI) do not qualify as authors, and the Journal will screen for them in author lists. The use of AI (for example, to help generate content or images, write code, process data, or for translation) should be disclosed both in cover letters to editors and in the Methods or Acknowledgements section of manuscripts. Please see the COPE position statement on Authorship and AI for more details.
After manuscript submission, no authorship changes (including the authorship list, author order, and who is designated as the corresponding author) should be made unless there is a substantive reason to do so. The editor and all co-authors must agree on the change(s), and neither the Journal nor the publisher mediates authorship disputes. If individuals cannot agree on the authorship of a submitted manuscript, please contact the editorial office. The dispute must be resolved among the individuals and their institution(s) before the manuscript can be accepted for publication. If an authorship dispute or change arises after a paper is accepted, contact OUP’s Author Support team. COPE provides guidance for authors on resolving authorship disputes.
After submission, changing who is designated as the corresponding author will be permitted only where there is a substantive reason to do so. For the avoidance of doubt, changing the corresponding author in order to access Read and Publish funding is not permissible.
Plagiarism
Paediatrics & Child Health editors carefully review each manuscript for original content. Manuscripts that contain plagiarized material will be immediately rejected and those who supervise the authors informed if appropriate.
Peer review policy
A manuscript may be rejected without peer review if the Editor-in-Chief determines that it would be a low priority for publication. This is likely to happen if the manuscript lacks a novel, practical take-home point or if the findings are judged to be of minimal interest to general paediatricians.
For manuscripts sent for peer review, the goal is to obtain a minimum of two reviews. Reviewers suggested by the authors may be invited if they appear to be unbiased experts in the field. Reviews are single blinded and are not published. If obtaining two reviews proves to be difficult, the editor assigned to the manuscript, or another editorial board member, may write the second review. The editor assigned to the manuscript makes the final decision about acceptance of the manuscript.
Reporting style
It is highly recommended that where applicable your manuscript follow the appropriate reporting guidelines on the EQUATOR website.
Informed consent
Patients have a right to privacy and they and/or their parents/guardians must provide verbal or written consent if there is any possibility that they could be recognized from a case description or photograph. A sample consent form and instructions for use of the form are available for your use.
While complete anonymity may be difficult to achieve, identifying information, including patients’ names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions. Masking the eye region in photographs or patients is not adequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note.
Conflict of interest and financial disclosure
Paediatrics & Child Health and the Canadian Paediatric Society require authors to disclose any and all potential, perceived or actual conflicts of interest (defined as any financial relationship that relates in any way to the content of the manuscript). These include but are not limited to specific financial interest, relationship and affiliations relevant to the topic(s) discussed in the submitted manuscript. These could be employment/affiliation, grants or funding, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or option, expert testimony, royalties, or patent files, received or pending.
Include all conflicts of interest on the title page. Err on the side of over-disclosure. It is very rare that a manuscript would be rejected because of an identified conflict of interest, but your manuscript is likely to be rejected if we uncover an undisclosed conflict of interest. Our goal is to be aware of any conflicts to ensure there is no bias in the methodology or in the discussion of the results. If none of the authors has a relevant conflict of interest, include a statement confirming that there are none.
Once an article is likely to be accepted, manuscript authors will be required to complete an ICJME Conflict of Interest form prior to publication. These forms are available via the ICJME website, or are available on request from the journal editorial office. Again, err on the side of over-disclosure, including any conflicts that have arisen since the original cover letter was submitted.
This policy is not intended to prevent authors with financial or other interests from publishing their work. However, it is the journal’s responsibility to provide reviewers and readers with full disclosure to ensure scientific integrity.
Permission to reproduce published material
Authors are responsible to obtain written permission from the publisher and the author to reproduce any previously published work. A sample request form is available for your use.
Statement of transmittal
All statements and opinions are the responsibility of the authors. With submission of a manuscript, a statement of transmittal must indicate that all authors have participated in the research, and have reviewed and agree with the content of the article.
Ethics of human and animal experiments
If human subjects are involved, the text must indicate that all gave verbal or written informed consent and that the protocol was approved by the institutional ethics review committee, providing the name of the ethics board that approved the study and the number of the ethics approval.
When reporting on human subjects, the Methods section should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and so would be compliant with the Helsinki Declaration (1964, amended most recently in 2008) of the World Medical Association. The name of the authorizing body should be stated in the paper. The Methods section should include a statement that the patient’s written consent was obtained and any information, including illustrations, should be as anonymized as far as possible. Patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers should not be used in the text or in illustrative material.
We do not publish animal research.
Appeal process
If an original manuscript is rejected, the author can appeal the decision to the Editor-in-Chief within 30 days of the decision. For original manuscripts rejected by the Editor-in-Chief without peer review, one or more Senior Editors will be asked to review the decision. Please note that there is no appeal process for Letters to the Editor. The main reason that manuscripts are rejected is that they do not fulfill the following three criteria:
- Of interest to a significant number of general paediatricians and family physicians who care for children and youth in Canada.
- Add something new to the literature or present information in a novel format appealing to our readers.
- Contain at least one practical take-home point for the reader.
Availability of Data and Materials
Where ethically feasible, Paediatrics & Child Health strongly encourages authors to make all data and software code on which the conclusions of the paper rely available to readers. We suggest that data be presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files, or deposited in a public repository whenever possible. For information on general repositories for all data types, and a list of recommended repositories by subject area, please see Choosing where to archive your data.
Data Citation
Paediatrics & Child Health supports the Force 11 Data Citation Principles and requires that all publicly available datasets be fully referenced in the reference list with an accession number or unique identifier such as a digital object identifier (DOI). Data citations should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite:
- [dataset]* Authors, Year, Title, Publisher (repository or archive name), Identifier
*The inclusion of the [dataset] tag at the beginning of the citation helps us to correctly identify and tag the citation. This tag will be removed from the citation published in the reference list.
Preprint policy
Authors retain the right to make an Author’s Original Version (preprint) available through various channels, and this does not prevent submission to the journal. For further information see our Online Licensing, Copyright and Permissions policies. If accepted, the authors are required to update the status of any preprint, including your published paper’s DOI, as described on our Author Self-Archiving policy page.
