Policies

The Radiology Journal publishes research articles, randomised controlled trials, meta-analyses, reviews, editorials, perspectives, commentaries, and correspondence, in all medical and surgical specialties. The journal follows the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (ICMJE Recommendations). The complete recommendations can be found here.

Article Processing Charges

We currently do not have any article processing charges. All articles once accepted will be published free of charge.

Authorship

The ICMJE Recommendations state that authorship credit requires:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data.
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
• Final approval of the version published.
• 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.

These conditions should be met for all types of submissions. Authors are asked to add a contributorship statement, outlining who has contributed what to the planning, conduct, and reporting of the work described in the article, under the ‘Contributorship Statement’ heading at the end of the manuscript. Each author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. Any individuals listed as co-authors on a manuscript will receive email confirmation of the manuscript submission. It is the collective responsibility of the authors to determine that all people named as authors meet all four criteria. On submission of the article through the Journal’s submission system, authors will be asked to provide a full name, email address and institutional affiliation for all contributing authors. Affiliations listed should be those where the work was carried out at the time the research/article was written.

Any individual who does not meet the above criteria, but has contributed in the submitted work, should be acknowledged under the heading ‘Acknowledgements’ at the end of the manuscript. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided general supervision of a research group or general administrative support, writing assistance, technical editing, language editing and proofreading. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. Please ensure that anyone acknowledged has granted permission to be listed.

Joint first authorship can be indicated by the inclusion of the relevant statement in the author details section of the manuscript. Deceased persons deemed appropriate as authors should be included with a dagger symbol (†) next to the author’s name, and a footnote stating that the author is deceased and giving the date of their death e.g. †Deceased 06 October 2020.

Competing Interests

When authors submit a manuscript, they are responsible for disclosing all relationships and activities that might bias or be seen to bias their work. Authors should disclose such conflicts of interest at the end of their submitted manuscript under the heading ‘Declarations’ and subheading ‘Conflict of Interest Statement’ (before the references). In addition, they should complete ‘The Radiology Journal Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest’ found here. The form should be completed by all authors, unless there is nothing to be declared; in which case only one form should be completed and submitted by the corresponding authors.

The Radiology Journal form has been adapted from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors uniform declaration of competing interests requirements, and authors should disclose four types of information:

• Their associations with commercial entities that provided support for the work reported in the submitted manuscript (the time frame for disclosure in this section of the form is the lifespan of the work being reported).
• Their associations with commercial entities that could be viewed as having an interest in the general area of the submitted manuscript (the time frame for disclosure in this section is the 36 months before submission of the manuscript).
• Any similar financial associations involving their spouse or their children under 18 years of age.
• Non-financial associations that may be relevant to the submitted manuscript.

Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/ registrations, and grants or other funding. Failure to adhere to these requirements will result into the submission being returned back to the author. Our editors will not reject papers on the basis of competing interests, but these will be declared on the published manuscript.

Copyright

The Radiology Journal allows the author to retain the copyright in their articles. Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) or Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licenses. Under CC BY-NC 4.0, others can access, copy, remix, transform and redistribute research, provided that the material will not be used for commercial purposes and that the author is correctly attributed. Under CC BY 4.0, others can access, copy, remix, transform and redistribute research, provided that the author is correctly attributed.

Corrections and retractions

Corrections after publication of the article are only possible in exceptional circumstances. In the event that an error is discovered in an article after publication, the authors should inform The Radiology Journal at editorial@radiologyj.com. Corrections will be made at the journal’s discretion, following to COPE guidelines as applicable. Minor corrections that do not affect the scientific understanding of the paper (for example formatting or typographical errors or preference of wording), may be rejected.

In cases of errors which can significantly affect the conclusions, such as unreliable data or findings, plagiarism, duplicate publication, and unethical research, The Radiology Journal will consider retraction of the published article. Authors or readers who become aware of errors in published articles should contact the Editorial Office. All retraction notices explain why the article was retracted.

Ethical Approval

Our Editors will consider whether the work is morally acceptable as determined by the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki. Any reports of studies or trials involving human or animal subjects, or medical records, should contain a statement that the procedures of the study received ethics approval from the relevant regional or institutional ethics committee responsible for human experimentation or complied with regulations governing experimentation using animals. This statement should be added at the end of the manuscript under the heading ‘Declarations’ and Subheading ‘Ethical approval’.

Authors may wish to include statements to confirm that trials conformed to Good Clinical Practice (for example, US Food and Drug Administration Good Clinical Practice in FDA-Regulated Clinical Trials; or, UK Medicines Research Council Guidelines for Good Clinical Practice in Clinical Trials). If no ethics committee or IRB available locally, then authors should explain how the study adhered to the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.

Funding

Authors should declare all sources of funding under the heading ‘Declaration’ and subheading ‘Funding’ at the end of the manuscript file (before the references). Authors must describe the role of the study sponsor(s) in the study design; collection, analysis and interpretation of the data; writing of the report; and decision to submit the paper for publication.  If the funder(s) had no such involvement, this should be stated.

Patient consent and confidentiality

A case report submitted to The Radiology Journal should always have consent from the patient before publication. If consent cannot be obtained, then the author should provide evidence that steps have been taken to obtain consent and the case report should be sufficiently anonymised. If the patient is deceased, then the Data Protection Act does not apply. However, authors’ should seek permission from the patient’s next of kin where possible.

The manuscript should not include any personal medical information or images of identifiable patients. All information that would permit identification of the patient should be removed. If there is any doubt, the consent of the patient should be obtained in writing, and to ensure confidentiality, retained by the author rather than sent to the journal.

Peer Review Process

This journal operates a double-blind review process. All manuscripts will first be reviewed by the Editors. At this stage some manuscripts may be returned or rejected if they are deemed to be outside the aims and scope of the journal, or if they have not been presented in accordance with the submission requirements. All manuscripts considered suitable by the Editors will be sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the scientific quality of the paper. An anonymous version of the manuscript will be used for review purposes, so that the identities of the authors are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa. A different process is used for special issue articles which are reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief and the Guest Editor, with reference to other reviewers if necessary, prior to acceptance. Authors may follow the progress of their manuscript during the peer review process by logging into the online submission system. Once a decision has been made on whether to publish the manuscript the corresponding author will be notified by email. The Editor's decision is final.

Submission Declaration

A manuscript is considered on the understanding that it has been submitted exclusively to The Radiology Journal, the data presented have not been published elsewhere and that no additional submission will be made elsewhere unless the paper is rejected. Submission is acceptable if the work has been previously published in the form of an abstract, academic thesis or published lecture, however this should be explicitly stated in the cover letter.