Guide for Authors

About the Journal
Yeditepe Medical Journal (YMJ) is a peer-reviewed and open-access international scientific journal that publishes original clinical and experimental research conducted in all fields of medicine, pharmacy, health sciences and biotechnology. The journal also publishes invited reviews, original research, case reports and letters to the editor. The language of the journal is English.

The journal is owned and supported by Yeditepe University (Istanbul, Turkey). YMJ is published electronically and quarterly. Each issue will be prepared in a topic-based manner and include relevant reviews, original research and case reports.
The editorial board of the journal consists of experts from all disciplines in health sciences and biotechnology. The journal is based on independent and peer-reviewed principles.

Only unpublished papers that are not under review for publication elsewhere must be submitted. YMJ does not accept multiple or duplicate submissions even though the previous one was published in a different language. The authors are responsible for the scientific content of the material to be published. YMJ reserves the right to request any research materials on which the paper is based.
The primary aim of the journal is to publish original articles with high scientific and ethical quality and serve as a good example of publications in health sciences.

The Editorial Board of the YMJ and the Publisher adheres to the principles of the International Council of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the Council of Science Editors (CSE), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), the World Medical Association (WMA), the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the European Association of Science Editors (EASE), and the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE).
All articles are available in PDF format at the journal website (www.yeditepemedicaljournal.org), and can be downloaded free of charge.

Scope of the Journal
The Yeditepe Medical Journal (YMJ) is an open access peer-reviewed international journal that is freely available on the www.yeditepemedicaljournal.org website. The journal welcomes manuscripts related to all aspects of medical and health sciences from researchers worldwide. Contributions are in English and processed via the journal’s website. YMJ invites authors to submit their original work that communicates with the international scientific and clinical communities, their current research, may they be either theoretical, applied or clinical innovative studies. YMJ is being published quarterly and accepts three types of manuscripts: original research, invited reviews and case reports.

Publication Policy
Open Access and Free Submission Statement

The YMJ is a fully open access journal. Thus, readers do not have to pay to read all the online published manuscripts in this journal. Also, it is important to notice for authors that there are no subscription, submission or processing fees.

Permissions
The Institute of Health Sciences of Yeditepe University holds copyright for articles published in YMJ. Permissions are required to reuse all or part of articles published in YMJ, including figures and tables. Ideas, opinions or conclusions stated in articles or advertisement belonging to companies or authors, they do not represent the Editorial Board.

Reuse of YMJ Article Content
YMJ applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to articles and other works published. If you submit your paper for publication by YMJ, you agree to have the CC BY license applied to your work. Under this Open Access license, you as the author agree that anyone can reuse your article in whole or part for any purpose, for free, even for commercial purposes. These permitted uses include but are not limited to self-archiving by authors of submitted, accepted and published versions of their papers in institutional repositories. Anyone may copy, distribute, or reuse the content as long as the author and original source are properly cited. This facilitates freedom in reuse and also ensures that YMJ content can be mined without barriers for the needs of research.

Submission rules
All manuscripts must be submitted electronically via the website of the journal (www.yeditepemedicaljournal.org/submission). The system will guide the authors stepwise to complete the submission process. Before starting, authors must make sure that:
- they have prepared an original work following the instructions provided in the Authors guidelines (www.yeditepemedicaljournal.org/guide_for_authors)
- their work has neither been published already, submitted nor considered for publication elsewhere.
- they have completed and signed the copyright release form

Please notice that it will not be possible for authors to change authors names or their order after acceptance of the manuscript.

Evaluation procedure:

Admissibility check: Scope, language and similarity check
During the first check, editors may return the articles for the following reasons:
- The manuscript does not follow instructions given in the Authors Guidelines (www.yeditepemedicaljournal.org/guide_for_authors),
- Author names and their order in the manuscript are not consistent with those on the copyright form,
- The similarity score generated by the similarity report (iThenticate result) exceeds 25%.

Review process
The reviewing is blind peer review process, where the reviewers have access to the authors’ name and affiliations. The identity of referees is however not revealed to authors.
Authors have to cooperate fully with this process. They should provide quickly any information requested by the editorial staff that may concern the provided data, proof of ethics approval, patient consents or copyright permissions. Also, for manuscripts for which revisions are required, authors should provide in a timely response that considers point-by-point reviewers’ comments. Their manuscript should be updated in accordance with this response and should be re-submitted via the submission system before the given deadline.

Before publication, proofs will be sent to authors for correction. No further changes will be accepted after the proof approval.

Plagiarism
Plagiarism is not tolerated by the YMJ. All submitted manuscripts will be checked for similarity through the iThenticate® software, that matches the content of the manuscript with billions of published documents to generate a similarity report. The manuscripts submitted to the YMJ with similarity scores that exceed 25% will not be processed.

Ethical Policies
Any complication that may arise from the application of ethical rules will be the responsibility of the authors.
Particularly, concerning clinical studies, no information that may lead to patient identification (such as names, abbreviations, patient numbers, etc..) should be provided.

Patients must be blinded if there is no patient consent and/or any results related an ophthalmologic study.
Studies involving human subjects must be carried out according to the World Medical Association’s (WMA) Declaration of Helsinki. Authors must clearly state that the study protocol received institutional ethics board approval and that all participants provided informed consent in the format required by the relevant authorities and/or boards. The relevant ethics board(s) and approval code(s) must be given in the Methods part of the research article.

Studies involving animals must be carried out according to the principles stated in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals Authors must clearly state that the study protocol received institutional ethics board approval. The relevant ethics board(s) and approval code(s) must be given in the Methods part of the research article.

Types of Papers

• Review Articles: Only invited review articles are published in the YMJ. Review articles shall discuss the recent advances in a topic in health sciences. The evaluation criteria and procedure applied to original research studies are also relevant for reviews. The abstract should be no longer than 300 words. The abstracts of review articles do not need to be in structured format.
• Research Articles: Manuscripts submitted must contain original research that was not published elsewhere, even partially, except as summaries of fewer than 400 words for scientific meetings. The recommended maximum length of original research articles is 5,000 words, with up to 8 figures or tables and 60 references. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and must be structured as follows: Aim, Patients/Methods, Results, Conclusions. For controlled clinical trials, CONSORT guidelines must be followed (see below).
• Case reports: Case reports are special features on clinical research with prominently specific objective and results, small patient series with a limited number of observations, and descriptive epidemiological studies. Each manuscript should contain subsections as Background, Case Report and Conclusion, and must be limited to 2000 words with no more than five figures or tables. Abstracts for case reports should be structured with the following subheadings: Background, Case Report, and Conclusion.
• Letters to Editors: Letters discussing articles published in the YMJ within the past six months, opinions or comments of related experiences may be considered. Also this section may consider for publication short reports on clinical experiences, novel findings, and technical comments in health sciences that can be reported in this format. Letters may not be longer than 600 words and exceed five references.

Permissions
Authors who are willing to include tables, figures, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the online and print format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers.

ORCID
The YMJ requires that the corresponding author provides his/her ORCID before proceeding with submission.

Title Page
Please make sure your title page contains the following information.

Title
The title should be concise and informative.

Running title:
A running title not exceeding 5 words or 50 characters should be provided.

Author information

• The full name(s) of the author(s)
• The affiliation(s) of the author(s), i.e. institution, (department), city, (state), country
• A clear indication and an active e-mail address of the corresponding author
• If available, the 16-digit ORCID of the author(s)

Abstract
Please provide an abstract of 200 to 300 words. The abstract should not contain any undefined abbreviations or any type of references.
The abstracts of review articles do not need to be in structured format. For research articles, abstracts must be structured as follows: Aim, Patients/Methods, Results, Conclusions.

For clinical trials

• Trial registration number and date of registration for prospectively registered trials
• Trial registration number and date of registration, followed by “retrospectively registered”, for retrospectively registered trials

Keywords
Please provide 4 to 6 keywords which can be used for indexing purposes.

Statements and Declarations
The following statements should be included under the heading "Statements and Declarations" for inclusion in the published paper. Please note that submissions that do not include relevant declarations will be returned as incomplete.

• Competing Interests: Authors are required to disclose financial or non-financial interests that are directly or indirectly related to the work submitted for publication.

Text Formatting
Manuscripts should be submitted in Word.

• Use a normal, plain font (e.g., 12-point Times Roman) for text.
• Use the automatic page numbering function to number the pages.
• Use tab stops or other commands for indents, not the space bar.
• Use the table function, not spreadsheets, to make tables.
• Use the equation editor or MathType for equations.
• Save your file in docx format (Word 2007 or higher) or doc format (older Word versions).

Abbreviations
Abbreviations should be defined at first mention and used consistently thereafter.

Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments of people, grants, funds, etc. should be placed in a separate section before the references. The names of funding organizations should be written in full.

Citation in the Text: Please ensure that every reference mentioned is included in the reference list and vice versa. Any references cited in the abstract should be provided in full. Unpublished findings and personal communications are excluded from the reference list but may be referenced in the text. If such references are included in the reference list, they should adhere to the journal's standard reference format, with the publication date replaced by either 'Unpublished results' or 'Personal communication.' Citing a reference as 'in press' indicates that the work has been accepted for publication.

Web References: The full URL and last access date should be provided for web references. Any additional information such as DOI, author names, publication dates, or source publications should also be included if known. Web references can be listed separately, after the reference list, under a distinct heading if preferred, or they can be integrated into the reference list.

Preprint references: The formal publication should be cited if a preprint is later published as a peer-reviewed article. However, if preprints play a central role in your work or cover significant developments in the field but have not been formally published, they may still be referenced. Preprints should be distinctly marked as such, for instance, by including the term "preprint" or the name of the preprint server in the reference. Additionally, the preprint DOI should be provided.

Reference style

Text: References should be indicated by numbers in square brackets in line with the text. The authors can be mentioned, but the reference number(s) must always be provided. All references must be in English; publications other than English are not accepted for regular research articles with fewer than 50 references.

List: The reference list should be arranged alphabetically and numbered (numbers in square brackets).

Examples:

Reference to a journal publication:

[1] Van der Geer J, Hanraads JAJ, Lupton RA. The art of writing a scientific article. J Sci Commun 2000;163:51-9.

Reference to a book:

[2] Strunk Jr W, White EB. The elements of style. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan; 1979.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book:

[3] Mettam GR, Adams LB. How to prepare an electronic version of your article. In: Jones BS, Smith RZ, editors. Introduction to the electronic age, New York: E-Publishing Inc; 1999, p. 281-304.

[4] M. Oguro, S. Imahiro, S. Saito, T. Nakashizuka, Mortality data for Japanese oak wilt disease and surrounding forest compositions, Mendeley Data, v1, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/xwj98nb39r.1.

Note the shortened form for the last page number, e.g., 51-9, and that for more than six authors, the first six should be listed followed by "et al." For further details, refer to the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts submitted to Biomedical Journals" (J Am Med Assoc 1997;277:927-934) (see also http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html).

Always use the standard abbreviation of a journal’s name according to the ISSN List of Title Word Abbreviations, see
ISSN.org LTWA

If you are unsure, please use the full journal title.
Tables

• All tables are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
• Tables should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order.
• For each table, please supply a table caption (title) explaining the components of the table.
• Identify any previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference at the end of the table caption.
• Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data) and included beneath the table body.

• Supply all figures electronically in TIFF or JPEG format.
• Name your figure files with "Fig" and the figure number, e.g., Fig1.TIFF.
• Definition: Black and white graphic with no shading.
• Do not use faint lines and/or lettering and check that all lines and lettering within the figures are legible at final size.
• Scanned line drawings and line drawings in bitmap format should have a minimum resolution of 1200 dpi.
• If any magnification is used in the photographs, indicate this by using scale bars within the figures themselves.
• Halftones should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi.
• Definition: a combination of halftone and line art, e.g., halftones containing line drawing, extensive lettering, color diagrams, etc.
• Combination artwork should have a minimum resolution of 600 dpi.

• Color art is free of charge.
• Color illustrations should be submitted as RGB (8 bits per channel).

• Keep lettering consistently sized throughout your final-sized artwork, usually about 2–3 mm (8–12 pt).
• Avoid effects such as shading, outline letters, etc.
• Do not include titles or captions within your illustrations.

• All figures are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
• Figures should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order.
• Figure parts should be denoted by lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.).
• Figures in online appendices [Supplementary Information (SI)] should be numbered separately.

• Each figure should have a concise caption describing accurately what the figure depicts. Include the captions in the text file of the manuscript, not in the figure file.
• Figure captions begin with the term Fig. in bold type, followed by the figure number, also in bold type.

• Figures should be submitted separately from the text as well as embedded in the text.
• When preparing your figures, size figures to fit in the column width.

• If supplying any supplementary material, the text must make specific mention of the material as a citation, similar to that of figures and tables.
• Refer to the supplementary files as “Online Resource”.
• Name the files consecutively, e.g. “ESM_3.mpg”, “ESM_4.pdf”.

• For each supplementary material, please supply a concise caption describing the content of the file.

• Supplementary Information (SI) will be published as received from the author without any conversion, editing, or reformatting.

Copyright transfer

All authors should provide a signed Copyright Transfer form along with the submission.

Proof reading

The purpose of the proof is to check for typesetting or conversion errors and the completeness and accuracy of the text, tables and figures. Substantial changes in content, e.g., new results, corrected values, title and authorship, are not allowed without the approval of the Editor.
After online publication, further changes can only be made in the form of an Erratum, which will be hyperlinked to the article.

Conflict of interest
Authors must indicate whether or not they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. This note should be added in a separate section before the reference list.
If no conflict exists, authors should state: “The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.”

Suggesting / excluding reviewers
Authors are welcome to suggest suitable reviewers and/or request the exclusion of certain individuals when they submit their manuscripts. When suggesting reviewers, authors should make sure they are totally independent and not connected to the work in any way. It is strongly recommended to suggest a mix of reviewers from different countries and different institutions. Please note that the YMJ may not use the suggestions, but suggestions are appreciated and may help facilitate the peer review process.

Authorship principles
These guidelines describe authorship principles and good authorship practices to which prospective authors should adhere to.

Data transparency
All authors are requested to make sure that all data and materials as well as software application or custom code support their published claims and comply with field standards.

One author is assigned as Corresponding Author and acts on behalf of all co-authors and ensures that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately addressed.
The Corresponding Author is responsible for the following requirements:

• ensuring that all listed authors have approved the manuscript before submission, including the names and order of authors;
• managing all communication between the Journal and all co-authors, before and after publication;*
• providing transparency on re-use of material and mention any unpublished material (for example manuscripts in press) included in the manuscript in a cover letter to the Editor;
• making sure disclosures, declarations and transparency on data statements from all authors are included in the manuscript as appropriate.

Affiliation
The primary affiliation for each author should be the institution where the majority of their work was carried out. If an author has subsequently moved, the current address may additionally be stated. Addresses will not be updated or changed after publication of the article.

Cell lines
If cells are used, authors must declare in the manuscript: what cell lines were used by describing the source of the cell line, including when and from where it was obtained. If cells were bought from a life science company the following need to be given in the manuscript: name of company (that provided the cells), cell type, catalog number of cell line.

Clinical Trial Registration
The World Health Organization (WHO) definition of a clinical trial is "any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes". The WHO defines health interventions as “A health intervention is an act performed for, with or on behalf of a person or population whose purpose is to assess, improve, maintain, promote or modify health, functioning or health conditions” and a health-related outcome is generally defined as a change in the health of a person or population as a result of an intervention.
To ensure the integrity of the reporting of patient-centered trials, authors must register prospective clinical trials (phase II to IV trials) in suitable publicly available repositories. For example www.clinicaltrials.gov or any of the primary registries that participate in the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.
The trial registration number (TRN) and date of registration should be included as the last line of the manuscript abstract. For clinical trials that have not been registered prospectively, authors are encouraged to register retrospectively to ensure the complete publication of all results. TRN, date of registration and the words ‘retrospectively registered’ should be included as the last line of the manuscript abstract.

Standards of reporting
Checklists are available for a number of study designs, including:
Randomised trials (CONSORT) and Study protocols (SPIRIT)
Observational studies (STROBE)
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) and protocols (Prisma-P)
Diagnostic/prognostic studies (STARD) and (TRIPOD)
Case reports (CARE)
Clinical practice guidelines (AGREE) and (RIGHT)
Qualitative research (SRQR) and (COREQ)
Animal pre-clinical studies (ARRIVE)
Quality improvement studies (SQUIRE)
Economic evaluations (CHEERS)

Informed consent
All individuals have individual rights that are not to be infringed. Individual participants in studies have, for example, the right to decide what happens to the (identifiable) personal data gathered, to what they have said during a study or an interview, as well as to any photograph that was taken. In many instances authors will need to secure written consent before including images. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve in some cases. Detailed descriptions of individual participants, whether of their whole bodies or of body sections, may lead to disclosure of their identity. Informed consent for publication should be obtained if there is any doubt.

Summary of requirements
Please see the various examples of wording below and revise/customize the sample statements according to your own needs.

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Informed consent was obtained from legal guardians.

Written informed consent was obtained from the parents.

Verbal informed consent was obtained prior to the interview.

Sample statements for “Consent to publish”:

The authors affirm that human research participants provided informed consent for publication of the images in Figure(s) 1a, 1b and 1c.

The participant has consented to the submission of the case report to the journal.

Patients signed informed consent regarding publishing their data and photographs.

Sample statements if identifying information about participants is available in the article:

Additional informed consent was obtained from all individual participants for whom identifying information is included in this article.

Authors are responsible for correctness of the statements provided in the manuscript. See also Authorship Principles. The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to reject submissions that do not meet the guidelines described in this section.

Images will be removed from publication if authors have not obtained informed consent or the paper may be removed and replaced with a notice explaining the reason for removal.