BEFORE YOU SUBMIT

The journal scope and acceptable article types can be found at JSR Aims and Scope. Please read Ethics and Policies before submitting your paper.

Open Access

JSR is an open access journal, and all papers are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), with copyright retained by the authors. An Article Processing Charge is required to cover the journal cost.

Research Involving Human Subjects

Ethics Approval

All experiments involving human subjects, including the harvesting of tissues, use of medical records and/or personal biological data, must comply with the Declaration of Helsinki and regulations established by the author’s government and research institution. An approval from the institution’s Review Board or an Ethics Committee should have been obtained before performing the research. A statement detailing the approval, including the name of Review Board or Ethics Committee, the project identification code, and the date of approval should be made available in the manuscript.

Informed Consent

Written informed consent for the research and its related publications must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian in case of children) for all research involving human subjects. A statement to this effect should be contained in the manuscript.

Personal privacy should be protected and for manuscripts in which a research participant’s identity details, images or videos must be included for scientific purposes, written informed consent for the publication of these details must be obtained from that person (or parent or guardian if the person is incapable). The consent must be for publication of their details under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). In the manuscript a statement of the publication consent should be included.

Clinical Trials Registration

We strongly encourage authors to pre-register clinical trials and add the trial registration number and date of registration in the manuscript abstract. We recommend authors use registries listed on ICMJE website and WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

Research Involving Animals

All research involving vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must have been approved by the author’s institution or by an appropriate ethics committee, and must have been performed in line with the applicable guidelines or standards. Approval must have been received prior to the beginning of the animal research. Details of the approval (including name of ethics committee, project identification code and date of approval) and animal welfare considerations must be included in the manuscript upon submission.

Where unregulated animals are used or ethics approval is not required by a specific institute or committee, authors should make this fact clear in submitted articles and should state reasons why ethical approval was not required. Editors reserve the right to reject any work that they believe has not been performed to a high ethical standard. We encourage authors to comply with ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines when reporting of research using animals.

Reporting Guidelines

We recommend authors refer to the reporting guidelines listed at EQUATOR Network when reporting health research, and check FAIRsharing Portal for prescriptive checklists for reporting biological and biomedical research, where applicable. If the manuscript contains statistical analysis, please refer to SAMPL guidelines. We will ask reviewers to check the statistical methods during peer review.

Authorship Criteria

According to ICMJE Recommendations, authorship should be based on following criteria:

Acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading alone, do not qualify for authorship. Those contributors should not be listed as authors but they should be acknowledged.

Authors’ contributions should be specified in the manuscript in “Author Contributions” Section. Changes to authorship cannot be made after a paper is accepted for publication.

PREPARE THE MANUSCRIPT

Language

Manuscripts must be written in English. For editors and reviewers to accurately assess the work presented in your manuscript, you need to ensure the English language is of sufficient quality to be understood. The JSR Editorial Board, however, encourages submissions from investigators throughout the world.

Text Format

Authors should use the Microsoft Word template to prepare manuscripts. To facilitate peer-review process, tables and figures should be included in the manuscript close to where they are cited the first time. High resolution figures can be uploaded to submission system as a backup. Manuscripts should be submitted in .doc or .docx format, and should not be locked or protected. Editable files are required for processing.

Graphical Abstract

Authors are encouraged to provide a graphical abstract as a self-explanatory image to appear in the online Table of Contents. It should be a high quality image in JPEG format. The graphical abstract can be uploaded during submission or proofreading. It may be used in social media campaigns or other marketing activities related to the paper after it is published.

Title Page

The title page should include:

Abstract

The abstract should be an objective representation of the article. A structured abstract or one paragraph abstract are both acceptable. The word limit is 250 words. Do not include citations in the abstract. Authors can use following style for structured abstracts.

Keywords

Authors should provide 3 to 10 keywords specific to the article. Good and accurate keywords can increase online visibility of the paper.

Introduction

The introduction should explain the background of the study, the questions it aims to address, and how important it is. A concise literature review of key publications should be included. Authors should write the introduction as understandable as possible, because readers might be outside of the research field. If there are controversies or disagreements in the field, please mention them so that readers can get an overall view on the topic. The introduction should conclude with a statement on the aim of the study, and its contribution to the field.

Materials and Methods

Materials and methods section should provide enough details so that others can replicate the study. Common procedures can be provided with a reference, but new protocols should be described in details. If the new protocol is complicated, authors can submit a separate Protocol type paper alongside the study, which will be peer-reviewed together.

Researches involving animals or human subjects should indicate the details of ethical approval, including name of the ethics committee, project identification code and date of approval.

Statistical methods used in the study should be clarified in this section. The description should allow a knowledgeable reader with access to original data to judge its appropriateness and verify the results.

Results

Results section should describe findings from the study arranged in a logical sequence without bias or interpretation. This section may be divided into subsections and subsubsections.

Authors are encouraged to make all relevant data from the study (including raw data, software, code, models, algorithms, etc.) available to readers, either through supplementary materials for small datasets or publicly available registries for large datasets. Please include name of the registry and link to data in Data Availability section below.

Figures

All figures should be cited in the paper in a consecutive order as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. All figures should be placed in the main text near to where they are cited the first time, with a resolution of 300 dpi or higher.

Tables

Tables should be numbered and cited in the main text in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e., Table 1, Table 2, etc.). All tables should be placed in the main text near to where they are cited the first time.

Mathematical Equations

Math equations should be editable. Do not provide them as images. Simple formulas should be presented in line with main text where possible. Variables should be in italics.

Units of Measurement

Units of measurement should be presented clearly and concisely using System International (SI) units. If other quantities are mentioned, give their equivalent in SI.

Discussion

This section should explain the implication of the results and should place them into a broader context of the current literature. Discussion may contain subheadings to highlight important areas that are expanded on in the main text.

Conclusion

This section should clearly and concisely describe the main conclusions of the work and their significance. You may also highlight limitations of the study and future research directions.

Supplementary Materials

Additional files and data can be uploaded as supplementary files during submission. Title of the supplementary files should be included in the “Supplementary Materials” section. References cited only in supplementary materials should be listed at the end of the References section in the manuscript. Supplementary materials will not be typeset after acceptance.

Data Availability Statement

For all research articles, authors are encouraged to make a data availability statement. Some examples are listed below:

Author Contributions

All authors should meet the authorship criteria listed in International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines. Individual author’s contributions should be provided in the manuscript, for example: “AB, BC and CD designed the study. AB, DE and EF performed the xyz experiments. FG and GH made the simulations. BC, HJ, and CD analyzed the data. AB, BC and CD wrote the paper with input from all authors.” Acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading alone, do not qualify for authorship. Those contributors should not be listed as authors but they should be acknowledged in Acknowledgments section.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors must declare any competing financial and non-financial interests in relation to the work in the “Conflicts of Interest” section. Competing interests can arise in relationship to an institution, organization, or another person. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. If there is no conflict of interest, authors should state: “The author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest.”

Editors and reviewers are also required to declare any competing interests and may be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists.

Funding Sources

Authors are required to declare funding sources that supported the research in “Funding” section. Please include name of the funders and relevant grant numbers. Please also state whether the funding sources were involved in study design, data collection and interpretation, manuscript preparation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments should be included at the end of the paper, before list of references. In this section you can acknowledge any support given by others which is not covered by the “Author Contributions” or “Funding” sections.

References

Authors are responsible for ensuring that each reference is accurate and complete. All references should be numbered consecutively in order of appearance in main text, figures, tables and supplementary materials. References cited only in the supplementary materials should be listed at the end of the “References” section in the manuscript. Citations of references in text should be identified using numbers in square brackets (e.g., “as discussed by xxx [2]”; “as discussed elsewhere [2,3]”). The digital object identifier (DOI) should be included for all references where available.

JSR uses “Vancouver” style, as outlined in the ICMJE sample references (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html) with some variations on electronic materials. Journal abbreviations can be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals.

The EndNote style file for Hapres journals can be downloaded here.

Examples:

SUBMIT AND AFTER

Submission System

Corresponding authors should submit their manuscripts on behalf of their co-authors via the JSR Online Submission System. For manuscripts with two or more corresponding authors, one of them should be selected as the submitting author and assume responsibility for all communications with the Journal. Nevertheless, all authors’ contact information should be provided during submission, and the journal may contact all authors for important steps during peer-review.

The JSR Online Submission System will guide you stepwise through the process of entering information concerning your manuscript and uploading files. A cover letter indicating significance of the manuscript, and how it can fill in the journal scope should be submitted together with the manuscript. Authors will receive notifications and editors’ correspondence through email. The submitting author can track status of the manuscript and upload revisions via the JSR Online Submission System. If you encounter any problems during the online submission process, contact jsr@hapres.com for support.

Submission Terms

Submission of manuscript implies that the work described has not been published previously, nor is under consideration for publication elsewhere. Manuscripts must be read and approved by all co-authors prior to submission. Please confirm the terms in cover letter. JSR uses the iThenticate software to detect instances of overlapping and text recycling in submitted manuscripts.

Peer Review

JSR applies single blind peer-review model, which means reviewers know the names of authors, but authors don’t know the identity of reviewers. All submissions will be initially assessed for compatibility with aims and scope of the journals. Manuscripts judged to be suitable will be sent to at least two independent expert reviewers to assess scientific quality. Please check “Editorial Workflow” for the whole peer-review process.

Submissions to Virtual Special Issues will undergo the same rigorous peer-review process as regular papers submitted to the journal. More information regarding Virtual Special Issues, please visit https://sustainability.hapres.com/SpecialIssues.aspx.

Proofs

All manuscripts will undergo some editorial modification, so it is important to check proofs carefully, especially on authors’ names, affiliations, funder names and grant numbers. An email will be sent to the corresponding author to check proofs. Only minor corrections are allowed at this stage. Major changes may need to go through another round of peer review. To avoid delays in publication, proofs should be checked and returned within 48 hours.

Share Article

Authors are encouraged to share their article with their colleagues or on social media after publication. A share button can be found on each paper’s html page. All papers can be accessed freely in the whole world. This will increase the visibility and impact of the research.

Corrections and Retractions

JSR publishes corrections, retractions, and expressions of concern as appropriate, and as quickly as possible. We follow the ICMJE and COPE guidelines where applicable.