For Authors

Regulations for publishing works

Annales Academiae Medicae Silesiensis (AAMS) is the official, interdisciplinary journal of the Medical University of Silesia (Katowice, Poland). Areas of interest include all disciplines of medical sciences and health sciences. It contains peer-reviewed original papers, experimental as well as clinical, and also review articles, case reports, communications and abstracts of papers from medical congresses and conferences in English (with the possibility of attaching the Polish version of the manuscript). The articles cover issues related to medicine and pharmacy, health care, rehabilitation and sports activity, dietetics and nutrition, public health and health risk management. They also cover issues at the intersection of medical and engineering sciences and the use of new technologies.
AAMS has been published continuously since 1978.

Since 2013, the original (reference) version of the journal has been available electronically at www.annales.sum.edu.pl. Since 2015, the articles have been published on the website as part of an annual, without any division into separate issue numbers.

Access to articles is free of charge and does not require logging in.

I. GENERAL REMARKS
1. The AAMS Editorial Office conforms to the principles provided in the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Association – Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects of 1964 and expects that research on humans has been conducted in accordance with these principles. With regard to the research using animal models, the Editorial Office expects compliance with the principles contained in the Interdisciplinary Principles and Guidelines for the Use of Animals in Research, Testing and Education, issued by the New York Academy of Sciences’ Ad Hoc Committee on Animal Research. All works relating to humans or animals must be approved by the relevant local ethics committee, which should be indicated in the work. All works submitted to AAMS are verified in the anti-plagiarism system.
2. To prevent unethical publication practices, in the event of detecting scientific misconduct, the AAMS Editorial Office follows the procedures of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
3. Prior to submitting the work to the Editorial Office, each author should read the Code of publishing ethics, available on the journal’s website.
4. When submitting the paper, the corresponding author will be asked to indicate three reviewers (name and surname, affiliation, e-mail address), in accordance with the guidelines:
– the reviewer should be an independent researcher and represent the field consistent with the subject of the publication
– the reviewer cannot be employed in the same institution with which the author/authors of the publication are affiliated
– at least one reviewer with a foreign affiliation, other than the nationality of the author/authors of the publication, should be indicated (applies to authors affiliated with Polish institutions only).
The final decision regarding the selection of reviewers rests with the editors.
5. In view of the current publication standards, the AAMS Editorial Office recommends that authors use a unique ORCID ID and provide it next to their names in works submitted to AAMS.
6. The publisher shall not charge any fees for any stage of the publishing process.

II. RULES FOR REVIEWING PAPERS
1. Submitted works are evaluated in terms of values such as innovative presentation of the topic, importance for the further development of scientific research and for clinical management.
2. Works registered in the reviewing system of AAMS journal are automatically forwarded to the anti-plagiarism system used by the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice (plagiat.pl). The results of the verification procedure in the form of an electronic evaluation report is attached to the work and made available to the reviewer(s), as well as the journal’s Editor-in-Chief. In the event the system detects plagiarism, the final decision on whether or not to accept the work rests with the reviewers.
3. Works are initially evaluated by the AAMS Editorial Office (editorial review):
a) works which do not meet the basic conditions for publication are rejected;
b) works which are incomplete or prepared in a style inconsistent with the rules provided in point VIII are returned to the authors without any content evaluation;
c) the remaining works are registered and subsequently submitted to two independent reviewers, whose identity is hidden and who are not connected with the institution where the work originated; both the reviewer and author identities are concealed (double-blind peer review).
4. The decision on qualifying the work for publication is sent by the Editorial Office via e-mail to the author responsible for correspondence, together with a reference number which should be used during further contact with the publisher.
5. The manuscript is approved for publication on the basis of positive opinions of the reviewers.
6. The reviewers issue their opinion on the basis of a detailed evaluation of the work compared with other papers published on the subject, taking into account the following criteria:
a) originality of the work,
b) significance of the obtained results,
c) quality of the methodology and data,
d) manner of presenting the results,
e) quality of discussions,
f) selection of reference literature.
An opinion on whether the work meets the ethical requirements is also provided by the reviewers.
The conclusions contain information on whether the work may be accepted for publication without changes/accepted after taking into account the corrections suggested by the reviewer/reconsidered after significant corrections and re-review, or whether it should be rejected.
In the final stage, the reviewers provide confidential comments to the Editorial Office, as well as general and detailed (optional) comments to the authors.
The reviewers have the opportunity to submit the content of the amended work in the form of an attachment.
7. In the event of conflicting opinions, i.e. when one review is positive while the other is negative, the work is evaluated by a third reviewer.
8. If both reviews are positive, but the acceptance of the work depends on the introduction of amendments suggested by a reviewer (or both reviewers), the work is sent back to the author, together with a request for improvement .
9. In the event that both reviews are positive, but the sum of points awarded in one of them amounts to less than 18 (with a maximum of 36 points), the Editor-in-Chief may, after justification, decide to reject the work.
10. The author familiarizes him/herself with the review, but without the possibility of obtaining information about the reviewer.
11. The author is obliged to formulate a written response to the review (with a description of the introduced changes) and submit it along with the text of the amended work within the established deadline.
12. If the author refuses to introduce the recommended amendments, the Editor-in-Chief may decide to reject the work.
13. After the author sends back the amended version of the work, the final decision on qualifying the paper for publication belongs to the Editor-in-Chief.
14. The Editorial Office undertakes to publish a list of all the reviewers of a given annual in AAMS once a year.

III. CONFLICT OF INTEREST
1. Upon submitting the work, the authors of research papers are obliged to disclose any financial obligations, if any, between the authors and the company whose product has significant importance in the submitted work, or a competitor. This information will not be disclosed to the reviewers nor will it affect the decision on publication of the work. After accepting the work, the Editorial Office and authors will decide on the form in which information on the sources of financing should be made available to readers. Any research subsidies or provisions of reagents or analytical tools should be indicated in the “Acknowledgements”.
2. Apart from indicating any possible sources of financing, authors are also obliged to disclose information about any contribution of scientific and research institutions, associations and other entities to the creation of the work.
3. Due to the fact that review papers and editorial commentaries consist in selecting
and interpreting data from the available literature, the AAMS Editorial Office expects authors of such works to be free from financial ties with companies whose products constitute the subject of the work (or rival companies).
4. The reviewers, members of the Editorial Office and Deputy Editor-in-Chief are required to disclose in a letter to the Editor-in-Chief any obligations and circumstances that may adversely affect the publishing process of the work under review. The letter should include a declaration of any existing financial relationships, e.g., with the company that produces the pharmaceuticals being the subject of the work.

IV. DISPUTE SETTLEMENT
Any disputes with the Publisher of the journal arising regarding the publication will be settled by the court relevant for the Publisher’s registered office. Legal relationships between the Publisher of the journal and the author are subject to Polish law and binding international conventions.

V. PERMISSION FOR PUBLICATION
Written consent of the prior publisher and authors of the original work is required in the case of republishing materials, including illustrative materials (tables, figures, photographs, drawings, etc.), protected by copyright. Any possible, associated costs are borne by the authors. If the information provided in the case study, illustration or text of the original work allows the identification of persons, their written consent for publication of the image must be obtained.

VI. REGULATORY AND ARCHIVAL POLICY
1. By submitting the work along with illustrations and tables, the author/co-author declares that the submitted work has not been previously published and has not been submitted to the editorial office of other journal publishers (except for abstracts not exceeding 400 words) and that the author is entitled to full economic and moral rights to the work, to dispose of these rights, and in this respect the author/co-author releases the publisher from liability to third persons for legal defects of the work.
2. AAMS journal is published in the open access system, and articles (the final version of the work after the review and editor and author corrections) are made available under the Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, also known as CC BY-SA 4.0 (Resolution No 8/2020 of the Senate’s Committee for Science of 14 April 2020). The license allows free copying, altering, disseminating, presenting the article for any, including commercial, purpose, provided that its authors are indicated (i.e. information is provided about its author(s) or about licensors other than the author(s), the title of the article, name of the journal, year, volume number, range of pages, DOI number as a link, name of the license under which the article is made available and a link to the full text of the license) and indicating the modifications introduced to it (e.g., The original was translated from Polish into English or The translation includes changes in relation to the original), if any. Moreover, when modifying and creating work based on the article, the work shall be made available under the same license as the original.
3. When submitting work with illustrations and tables, the author/co-author includes a Cover Letter (Author/Co-author declaration) signed by him/her, agreeing to the terms of publication in AAMS, including granting the publisher a free and non-exclusive CC BY-SA 4.0 license (available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en or another language version thereof, or any subsequent version of the said license published by Creative Commons). The author shall retain his/her copyrights.
4. The publisher recommends that authors use the version published on the AAMS website (the final version after the review and editor and author corrections) for autonomous sharing/archiving of works and metadata in any repositories and journal indexing databases. The sharing/archiving of preprints (author’s version before the review) and postprints (author’s version after the review, before publisher editing) requires providing the following information: a) preprint – e.g., “This work has been submitted to the Editorial Office of Annales Academiae Medicae Silesiensis (annales.sum.edu.pl), pending review”; after publishing the final version on the website of the journal, additional information shall be provided about it, e.g. “The final version of the work is available at ... [link to the work] under the license ... [name of the license]"; b) postprint – e.g. “This work is the author’s version corrected in accordance with reviewers’ comments, admitted for publication in Annales Academiae Medicae Silesiensis (annales.sum.edu.pl)”; after publishing the final version on the website of the journal, additional information shall be provided about it, e.g. “The final version of the work is available at ... [link to the work] under the license ... [name of the license]".
5. Authors do not bear for any costs related to the publication, nor do they receive any remuneration for it.

VII. DISCLAIMER
The Editorial Office and the Publisher make every effort to ensure that the content published in AAMS is reliable and accurate. However, opinions expressed in the journal are published under the sole responsibility of their authors. Therefore, neither the Editorial Office nor the Publisher can be held responsible for the consequences of using any inaccurate information. Doses of medications and other numerical values are checked with due diligence; however, any treatment regimens described in AAMS should be applied in accordance with the manufacturer’s information about the medication.

VIII. PREPARATION OF WORK
The work should be prepared in the A4 format, using common text editors (MS Word, Open Office etc.). It is recommended that standard fonts be used, 12 pt font size, 2.5 cm margins, 1.5 line spacing.

The elements required to be prepared in Polish apply only to Polish-language works.

Layout:
1) title page,
2) abstract in Polish, keywords in Polish (3-10, separated with commas),
3) abstract in English, keywords in English (3-10, separated with commas),
4) text of the work with tables and figures pasted in appropriate places,
5) if applicable, acknowledgements or information about grants or sources of financing of the work,
6) contributions of individual authors to the work,
7) references.

Pages should be numbered consecutively, starting with the title page. Abbreviations with the full term should be provided in round brackets next to the first occurrence of the abbreviated term in the text. Abbreviations not accepted by international groups of experts should be avoided.

Works should be structured as follows:

Title page. It should contain, starting from the top:
1) full names and surnames of all the authors*,
2) name(s) of the institution(s) from which the work originates,
3) full title of the work (Polish and English)
4) abbreviated title (Polish and English; up to 40 characters with spaces),
5) address for correspondence with academic title, name and surname, name of the institution, address (city, street), phone and facsimile number and (preferably official) e-mail address of the corresponding author.

* PLEASE NOTE: If the work was co-authored (this applies to all types of works, i.e. review papers, original works, case studies), the contributions of individual authors to its creation shall be disclosed (by providing information on who was the author of the concept, assumptions, employed methods, conducted research, data analysis, who wrote the paper etc.).
Any cases of lack of scientific misconduct, including ghostwriting and guest authorship, will be exposed, including the notification of relevant entities (institutions employing the authors, scientific societies, associations of science editors etc.). Ghostwriting is when a person who contributed significantly to the work is not listed as its author, or their contribution is not acknowledged in the content of the work. Guest authorship illustrates a situation in which the participation of an author is negligible or did not occur at all, and yet they are listed as an author/co-author of the work.
The Editorial Office is obligated to document all manifestations of scientific misconduct, especially those pertaining to the infringement and violation of the rules of ethics that apply in science.

Abstract (in Polish and English). It should not include more than 250 words. In the abstract of an original work, four paragraphs should be distinguished: Introduction, Material and Methodology, Results and Conclusions. The Editorial System also allows you to attach a graphical abstract to your work; this is an optional section.

Keywords (in Polish and English). Between 3 and 10 keywords, if possible, consistent with the Medical Subject Headings Index Medicus (MeSH), should be placed under the abstract (both in Polish and English).

Text. Original works should be divided into the following parts: Introduction, Material and Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusions. Review articles may be divided differently. The recommended volume of work should not be exceeded: original work – 3000 words, review article – 6000 words, case study – 2000 words, letter – 1000 words. The presented limits do not include abstracts, tables and reference literature. Tables and figures should be placed in the appropriate places in the text.
The applied statistical methods should be described in detail in order to enable a reader who has access to the source data and possesses statistical knowledge to verify the presented results. Wherever possible, a quantitative description should be used, together with appropriate measures of error or uncertainty (e.g. confidence intervals). It is necessary to avoid relying solely on the level of probability (p-value), calculated in the process of testing statistical hypotheses, which omits relevant information about the magnitude of the observed effect.

Reference literature. Reference literature items should be numbered according to the order they appear in the text (the Vancouver system).

Journals. In the case of citing journals, it is necessary to provide the following information: the item number, authors’ surnames and initial letters of first names (if there are less than six authors, all of them should be listed, if seven or more – the first six along with the annotation “et al.”), title of the work, title of the journal (abbreviations of journal titles should comply with Index Medicus), year, volume and number of the journal (in Arabic numerals), number of the first and last page, DOI number. Please refrain from using terms such as: “in print”, “in preparation”, “oral information”. In substantiated cases, they may be used in appropriate places in the text.
Example: Eliasson M., Jansson J., Nilsson P., Asplund K. Increased levels of tissue plasminogen activator antigen in essential hypertension. A population-based study in Sweden. J. Hypertens. 1997; 15(4): 349–356, doi: 10.1097/00004872-199715040-00005.

Books. In the case of citing books, it is necessary to include the following information: the item number, authors’ surnames and initial letters of first names, title, publisher, as well as the place and year of the publication.
Example: Domagalska-Szopa A., Szopa A. Postępowanie usprawniające w mózgowym porażeniu dziecięcym. Śląski Uniwersytet Medyczny w Katowicach. Katowice 2018.

When referring to the content of a book chapter, it is necessary to provide the following information: the surname of the chapter’s author, initials of the first name, chapter title, surname of the book’s author (editor), initials of the first name, book title, publisher, place and year of publication, as well as the page range.
Example: Kubicek C.P., Karaffa L. Kwasy organiczne. In: Ratledge C., Kristiansen B. [ed.]. Podstawy biotechnologii. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Warszawa 2011, p. 249–265.

Websites. Such a description should include: the author of the text, title, name of the website and the year the text was published, the website address and the date of access.
Example: Dreisinger E. McKenzie Therapy Classifications. Spine-health, 2007 [online] http://www.spinehealth.com/wellness/exercise/mckenzie-therapy-classifications [accessed on 2 September 2019].

Tables, figures, photographs. They may be black and white or in colour, numbered (tables in Roman numerals, figures in Arabic numerals) and described in English (if the work is prepared in two language versions, also in Polish). The value of bitmap quality should not be lower than 300 dpi at 100% size (height and width).

IX. SUBMISSION OF WORKS
The submission of work occurs exclusively via www.annales.sum.edu.pl (the “Submit your paper” tab), according to the Editorial System form.
The following file formats are accepted:
– for text: any version of Microsoft Word (doc, docx), rich text format (rtf),
– for figures: jpg, jpeg, gif, tif, tiff, bmp, png files.

X. SUBMITTING THE COVER LETTER (AUTHOR/CO-AUTHOR DECLARATION)
The required documents, i.e. the Cover Letter (Author/Co-author declaration) shall be sent to the Editorial Office in electronic format via Editorial System, sent with a safe electronic signature, in accordance with the applicable regulations; a scan of a handwritten declaration is also accepted.

PLEASE NOTE: If the work was co-authored, the Cover Letter shall be signed by each co-author separately.

Editorial Office address:
“Annales Academiae Medicae Silesiensis” Editorial Office
Department of Internal Diseases Propaedeutics
and Emergency Medicine
Faculty of Public Health in Bytom
Medical University of Silesia in Katowice
Piekarska 18, 41-902 Bytom
tel. +48 32 397 65 27
e-mail: aams@sum.edu.pl