Instruções para os Autores
1. EDITORIAL SCOPE
This document aims to instruct authors on the rules for submitting articles to the journal “Critical Patient” – Scientific Journal of the Portuguese Society of Critical Care Nurses” (RDC), to be analyzed by the Editorial Team.
Failure to comply with the requirements defined in this document will result in the immediate refusal to accept them.
2. EDITORIAL FREEDOM
RDC adopts the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) definition of editorial freedom (available at https://www.icmje.org/), which states that the Editor-in-Chief assumes complete authority over the editorial content of RDC.
SPEDC, as owner, does not interfere in the process of evaluation, selection, programming or editing of any manuscript, having total editorial independence.
3. ASSIGNMENT OF COPYRIGHT
By submitting articles, authors grant SPEDC the exclusive right to publish and distribute them in physical, electronic or other media that may exist, and also the right to use and exploit the submitted document, especially for assign, sell or license your content.
This authorization is permanent and is valid from the moment the manuscript is accepted for publication, having the maximum duration permitted by applicable Portuguese or international legislation.
The authors further declare that this transfer is made free of charge.
In cases where SPEDC informs authors that it has decided not to publish the article, the exclusive transfer of rights ceases immediately.
4. AUTHORS
The RDC does not have a defined limit on the number of authors, only requiring that they be properly identified with their full name, ORCID iD (https://orcid.org/), email, cell phone number, institutional affiliation (university, college, institute, department and research unit/center, city, country) and the country.
Authors, when submitting an article for publication in the RDC, are legally responsible for ensuring that the work does not constitute copyright infringement, as well as being responsible for complying with the ethical standards applicable to scientific work and publication, exempting the DRC from any liability.
It is the authors' responsibility to obtain the appropriate authorization for the publication of texts, images or any other material subject to copyright.
The contents of the texts and the opinions, ideas and concepts expressed in the published articles are the exclusive and entire responsibility of their authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the RDC Editorial Team.
5. AUTHORSHIP CRITERIA
The RDC follows the guidelines on authorship established by the ICMJE, in the Statement on Authorship and Contribution (available at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors- and-contributors.html).
All those designated as authors must meet the following criteria for authorship:
- Have a substantial, direct intellectual contribution to the design and preparation of the article;
- Participate in the analysis and interpretation of data;
- They participate in writing the manuscript, reviewing versions and critically reviewing the content; approval of the final version;
- They agree that they are responsible for the accuracy and integrity of all work.
Participants who do not meet the four criteria stated above but who contributed to the manuscript should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section, specifying their contribution.
Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision alone does not constitute Authorship.
6. AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS
Authors must identify their individual contribution to published articles, through an accurate and detailed description of the tasks that each one performed, filling out the Article and Author Contribution Form.
Authors' contributions are indicated according to CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) (available at https://credit.niso.org/), in which each author must identify the tasks in which he/she participated:
- Conceptualization - Formulation or evolution of overarching research ideas, objectives, and goals.
- Data processing - Management of activities to annotate (produce metadata), clean and maintain research data (including software code where it is necessary to interpret the data itself) for initial use and subsequent reuse.
- Formal analysis - Application of statistical, mathematical, computer or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
- Funding Acquisition - Acquisition of financial support for the project that generated this publication.
- Research - Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically conducting experiments or collecting data/evidence.
- Methodology - Methodological development or design; model creation.
- Project administration - Responsibility for managing and coordinating the planning and implementation of the research.
- Resources - Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instruments, computer resources, or other analytical tools.
- Software - Programming, software development; design of computer programs; implementation of computer code and supporting algorithms; performing tests on existing code components.
- Supervision - Responsibility for overseeing and leading the planning and execution of research activities, including external mentoring for core staff.
- Validation - Verification, as part of the activity or separately, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
- Visualization - Preparation, creation and/or presentation of published work, specifically data visualization/presentation.
- Writing (original draft) - Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically the writing of the initial draft (including substantive translation).
- Writing (reviewing and editing) - Preparation, creation and/or presentation of published work by members of the original research group, specifically critical analysis, commentary or review - including pre- and post-publication phases.
7. PEER REVIEW
All documents submitted to the RDC undergo a rigorous selection, evaluation and review process, based on scientific arbitration, on a double-blind basis, through a peer review process.
All submitted manuscripts are initially evaluated by the Editor-in-Chief and may be rejected at this stage, without being sent to the Section Editors and Reviewers. Final acceptance or rejection rests with the Editor-in-Chief, who reserves the right to refuse any material for publication.
Upon receipt oW PROCESSf the manuscript, if it complies with the instructions to authors and the editorial policy, the Editor-in-Chief sends the manuscript to the respective Section Editor. The Section Editor, after analyzing the article, forwards it to at least two reviewers.
Reviewers are required to respect the confidentiality of the peer review process and not to reveal details of a manuscript or its review, either during or after the review process.
Reviewers are given a maximum period of 4 weeks (consecutive), from the date of receipt of the manuscript, to proceed with its evaluation and issue an opinion.
Any changes or adaptations to the process require permission from the Editor-in-Chief.
Manuscripts should be written in a clear, concise, direct style so that they are intelligible to the reader. When contributions are considered suitable for publication based on scientific content, the Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to modify the texts to eliminate ambiguity and repetition, and to improve communication between the author and the reader. If extensive changes are required, the manuscript will be returned to the author for review.
Final acceptance is the responsibility of the Editor-in-Chief and is regulated by the following criteria:
- Originality - Original subject and/or method, with valuable information and presentation of new results or confirmation of previously verified results.
- Current and/or New - Current or new topic.
- Relevance - Applicability of results to solving specific problems.
- Innovation and Significance - Advancement of scientific, technical knowledge and/or clinical practice.
- Reliability and Scientific Validity - Good methodological quality demonstrated.
- Presentation - Good writing and organization of the text.
8. SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
With the aim of promoting transparency, control, regulation and evaluation (management of authors, reviewers and articles), the entire management of the RDC editorial process is fully automated through the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software, available at https://revistadoentecritico.spedc.pt/index.php/index/login, this is the route that authors should use to submit manuscripts.
Submission of articles implies prior registration as an author and respective login, using previously defined credentials.
All manuscripts must be submitted using the Article Template and be accompanied by:
- An Article Cover Letter for Submission;
- A Statement of Responsibility;
- An Article Sheet and Authors' Contributions.
Articles submitted for publication must be original, and RDC may resort to checking them using originality detection systems.
Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (available at http://www.icmje.org).
Authors should use standardized reporting guidelines proposed by the EQUATOR (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research) initiative in preparing articles (available at https://www.equator-network.org/), namely:
- Clinical Trials – CONSORT
- Observational Studies – STROBE
- Economic evaluation studies – CHEERS
- Diagnostic/prognostic evaluation studies - STARD or TRIPOD
- Qualitative studies - COREQ
- Systematic Reviews - PRISMA
- Clinical cases - CARE
Implementing the submission process implies that authors follow all the steps of the online submission, and must upload the full anonymized text. There will be no article submission fees charged.
Submission files must be in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx), according to the available Template.
All submitted articles must comply with current editorial policy. Items that do not meet these standards will be rejected immediately and will not begin the review process.
To promote speed in the communication and dissemination of scientific research, the RDC will operate under a continuous publication regime, that is, the works will be made available as soon as they are approved and edited in their final version. At this stage, the works can already be cited and are already in their final version.
9. SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION OF ARTICLES
The RDC follows the standards of the American Psychological Association (APA, 7th Edition, 2020), available at https://www.ua.pt/file/62230, therefore articles must be organized according to them.
The DRC follows the rules of the new orthographic agreement, so the Editor-in-Chief has reserved his right to change terms from Brazilian Portuguese to Portuguese from Portugal.
All articles submitted to RDC must have a title, a description of the Authors, an abstract, keywords, a body of text and bibliographic references.
In the event that there are people who have made important contributions to the article, but who do not meet the authorship criteria, a section called Acknowledgements can be included, which will be placed between the body of the text and the bibliographic references.
In the structure of the article, paragraphs are not tabbed and should not have footnotes. The top and bottom margins should be 2.5 cm and the left and right margins should be 3 cm.
The article must be a single column and not exceed 15 pages (including title, abstracts, keywords, bibliographic references, tables, figures, graphs, images, etc.).
9.1. TITLE
The title, in Portuguese, English and Spanish, must be objective, informative and contain a maximum of 15 words or 140 characters, including spaces, and must not contain abbreviations, acronyms or the geographic location of the study.
It must be formatted in Calibri Bold font, size 14 pts, with 1.5 spacing and left alignment.
9.2. AUTHORS
The word “Authors” must be formatted in Calibri Bold font, capital letters, size 12 pts, and the text must begin in the following paragraph.
The text must be formatted in Calibri font, size 11 pts, with 1.5 spacing and left alignment.
9.3. SUMMARY
The abstract must be written in Portuguese (resumo), English (abstract) and Spanish (resumen), with a maximum of 250 words or 1500 characters, including spaces, and must respect the structure and description related to the type of article.
The word “Abstract” must be formatted in Calibri Bold font, capital letters, size 12 pts, and the text must begin in the following paragraph.
The text must be formatted in Calibri font, size 11 pts, with 1.5 spacing and left alignment.
The title of each section of the abstract should be in bold, followed by a colon (:).
9.4. KEYWORDS
The word “Keywords” must be formatted in Calibri Bold font, size 12 pts, followed by a colon (“:”) and left-aligned.
Keywords must be a maximum of 5, written in Portuguese (descritores), English (descriptors) and Spanish (descriptores), separated by semicolons (“;”) and must use standardized descriptors.
In the health area, they must be extracted from the DeCS vocabulary (Health Sciences Descriptors - research available at http://decs.bvs.br/) or MeSH (Medical Subject Headings - research available at http://www.nlm. nih.gov/mesh/MBrowser.html).
9.5. BODY TEXT
The text of the work (article) must be written in the template provided by RDC, and must have a maximum of 40 thousand characters (excluding bibliographic references, tables, charts, graphs and figures), and must not be bold (except for titles and subtitles), underlined, or backgrounds. by heart or footnotes, respect the spelling of the orthographic agreement and not present semantic or morphological errors.
Titles (sections) must be formatted in Calibri Bold font, capital letters, size 12 pts, and the text must begin in the following paragraph. Subtitles (subsections) must be formatted in Calibri Bold font, with the first letter capitalized, size 12 pts, and the text must begin in the following paragraph.
The text must be formatted in Calibri font, size 11 pts, with 1.5 spacing and justified.
All paragraphs must be in lowercase Roman numerals and separated by semicolons (“;”).
In statistical data, decimal places must be separated with a full stop in English and with a comma in Portuguese.
9.6. TABLES AND FIGURES
The maximum number of graphic objects (tables, charts, figures and diagrams) must be 5 and must be numbered continuously, in Arabic numerals, be referenced in the text and, when necessary, be subject to analysis. Only those absolutely necessary for understanding the article should be included.
Tables must display the title above, and figures must display the title below, and must be formatted in Calibri font, size 8 pts, with 1.5 spacing and center alignment.
Titles must be preceded by “Table” / “Figure” and must not be written in capital letters, except at the beginning or when words are used whose rule so requires.
The format of symbols and statistical language must be appropriate.
Figures must be legible and indicate the source (the format must be JPG, TIF or PNG and their resolution must be equal to or greater than 600 dpi).
The source of non-original tables and/or figures must be indicated at the bottom, following the citation rules, followed by a colon (“:”). If it is by the author, you should put “Own elaboration”. When the source results from the joining and/or alteration of data, the source should be marked as “Adapted from ...”.
9.7. QUOTES
Citations should be numbered according to the order in which they appear in the body of the text. The numbering must be in parentheses and in a format larger than the line.
All citations must follow APA standards (7th Edition, 2020), and all cited authors must be in the list of bibliographic references.
In long quotations, the text must be formatted in Calibri font, size 9 pts, with single spacing, justified, indented on the left and right, without quotation marks (“”).
9.8. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
The selected references should preferably be primary, and should highlight the most representative publications of the State of the Art of the problem.
Bibliographic references must be prepared in accordance with APA standards, and at least 75% must be from journal articles indexed in scientific databases.
The titles of works should not be written in capital letters, except at the beginning or when words are used that require this by the rule. If you have a subtitle, separate it with a colon (‘:’) and capitalize the first word of the subtitle.
If the documents have a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), this must be presented in the reference.
The list of references should be organized, in terms of formatting, with tabs on the bottom lines, and no spaces between them.
The words “Bibliographic References” must be formatted in Calibri Bold font, capital letters, size 12 pts, and the text must begin in the following paragraph.
10. PLAGIARISM POLICY
Whether intentional or not, plagiarism is a serious copyright violation.
If evidence of plagiarism is found before/after acceptance or after publication of the article, the author will be given an opportunity to refute. If the arguments are not considered satisfactory, the manuscript will be deleted.
11. ERRATAS
RDC may publish changes, amendments or retractions to a previously published article if, after publication, errors or omissions are identified that influence the interpretation of data or information. Changes after publication will take the form of an erratum.
12. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
This regulation may be revised whenever necessary, and the Editor-in-Chief will be responsible for making decisions regarding cases not covered by this document.
You can also access the Instructions for Authors HERE!
