Contributions to the Ghana Medical Journal should be in English only.

 

All submissions to the Ghana Medical Journal shall be through its online submission and review system at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gma-gmj

 

CATEGORIES OF ARTICLES
The journal will consider manuscripts of the following categories for publication.

Original Research Article
Works publishable under this section include original work of suitable standard. Such work must be innovative or contribute further to well-established knowledge in a particular field. Manuscripts on all the medical specialties including the basic sciences, para-clinical and clinical sciences will be considered. Short or preliminary report on original works will be published under this section. 

Special Article
Review articles, manuscripts on special medical events, clinical notes and clinical investigation will be accepted for publication under this section. Review articles should cite original works that lead to formulation of a concept, theory or hypothesis. Review articles that seek to draw attention to current medical practice must have ample support in the form of published observations by other authors as well as the author’s own findings.

Case Report
Extremely rare clinical syndromes or presentations will be accepted for publication under this section. A collection of cases highlighting particular trends or problems in clinical practice are also acceptable. In both instances, contributors are advised to give ample evidence in support of their claims.

Correspondence 
Correspondence on articles published in the journal shall be entertained. Such correspondence must reach the editor not more than 3 months after publication of an article. The correspondence may seek further clarification on a published article. The author(s) whose article has attracted correspondence from readers will be contacted for their comments and both comments and correspondence on published articles will be published together.

Apart from correspondence and invited editorials, all submissions will be subjected to peer review.


LENGTH OF ARTICLES

The high cost of printing requires that manuscripts are not unduly lengthy. They must be concise.

Original Research Article

Including text, figures, tables and references should occupy not more than the space for maximum of 6000 words including tables and illustrations. Short or preliminary reports should not exceed 1500 words.


Special Article

Review articles should not exceed 7000 words including tables and illustrations. Manuscripts on special medical events should not exceed 1500 words including figures, tables and references.

Case Report

Case reports should not exceed 2500 words including figures tables and references.

 

PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPT

Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the current edition of the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (ICMJE Recommendations) at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/. 

Guidelines on tables and figures, units and abbreviations, are also to be seen in the above references.

 

All papers should be written using Microsoft Word with .doc or docx extension in A4 format with left right, top and bottom margins of 2.5cm.

 

MANUSCRIPT FORMATS
Original research articles, including short reports, must have the following parts: Title, Name(s) of author(s), Address of author(s), Running title, Summary, Keywords, Source of funding for the work, Introduction, Materials/subjects and Methods, Data analysis/calculations, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, Acknowledgements and References.

 

Case reports and review articles or special articles on medical events need not comply with this format.

The title, name(s) of author(s), address (es) of author(s), address for correspondence, e mail address and conflict of interest statement for all types of manuscript should be submitted as a separate file, and uploaded as “Supplementary file” during submission of the manuscript.

 

Title
The title of each manuscript should not have more than 20 words, or 100 characters, and should express clearly, the aims of the work.

 

Authorship

The ICMJE guidelines on authorship http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html is applicable to submissions to the Ghana Medical Journal. The role of each author, in the case of multiple authorship, must be indicated.

Names of Authors
The name of the principal author should appear first, followed by other authors. The names of the authors should be stated in the format [First name} [Middle name initial] and [Surname]. The name and address of the author for correspondence must be indicated in the “Supplementary file”

Summary
The summary should contain no more than 250 words and must be structured. The Summary should state:
Objectives: This should provide a clear statement of the main aim of the study and the major hypothesis or research question asked;
Design: Describe the study design (observational or analytical) indicating such features as pre-post, retrospective, randomization, placebo controlled, case control etc;
Setting: include the level of health of care, clinical department, community or groups, number of participating centres;
Participants: Who, how selected, what entry and exclusion criteria, how many entering and completing the study;
Interventions: What, how, for how long;
Main outcome measures: Those planned in protocol, those finally measured (if different, explain why);
Results: Main results with levels of significance and 95% confidence intervals as appropriate; and 
Conclusions: Primary conclusions and their implications. Suggest areas for further research if appropriate.

 

Funding

Indicate the source of funding for the study.

Keywords
These should include words that emphasize the theme or central point of the research. Keywords should as far as possible be selected from the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) list of Medline. A maximum of five (5) keywords should be listed. 

References
The number of references should be kept to a minimum. They should be numbered consecutively as they occur in the text. Identify references in the text, tables and legends by Arabic numerals placed in superscript. When the citation is at the end of a sentence it should be placed after the ‘full stop’.

The title of journals should be abbreviated according to the style used in Medline. References should be based on the ICMJE recommendations (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html). The title of journals and books, however, in the listed references should be in italics. The references should be listed in the order in which they appear in the text.

RESEARCH INTERGRITY/ETHICS POLICY
Originality of Articles
Manuscripts submitted to the Ghana Medical Journal must not have been submitted for publication in another journal. The laboratory or institute of origin of research and the role of each author in the case of multiple authorship, must be indicated. Manuscripts must be accompanied by a written declaration that the materials have not been submitted for publication either in part or in full, in another journal. Such declaration may be included in the Submission letter. The journal will/will not consider papers that have posted work prior to publication on preprint servers.

 

Ethical Clearance

Clinical studies are expected to conform to the Proposed International Guidelines for Biomedical Research involving Human Subjects issued by CIOMS, (Geneva 1982). Statements about ethical clearance (if appropriate) and obtaining participants’ informed consent should be included in the manuscript. Experimental animals must be properly anaesthetized to avoid suffering and anaesthetic procedure fully explained in the text. Authors are required to provide evidence of ethical approval for their study. All manuscripts should indicate the name of the approving institution and the reference number of the approval letter(s) obtained for the study protocol.  This information should be stated in the Methods section of the manuscript.

 

In the online submission process one of the checklist items is to indicate that ethical approval was obtained for the research. Authors are required to provide evidence of ethical approval for their study. The name of the approving institution and the reference number of the approval letter should be stated in the manuscript, in the Methods section.

 

Authors who do not comply with the said code of ethics both for humans and animals will have their manuscripts rejected.

 

Conflict of Interest

Authors and guest editors must disclose specific information relating to any financial relationship they may have with a sponsoring organization and any interest that organization presents, as well as with any for-profit product discussed or implied in the text of the manuscript. Helpful guidelines related to disclosure statements have been published by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (see http://www.icmje.orog/#conflicts).

 

Scientific misconduct and ethical standards

Scientific misconduct is related to the fabrication or falsification of data, and plagiarism. Breaches of publication ethics include duplicate publication, misrepresentation of author contributions, and failure to disclose potential financial conflicts of interest. The journal reserves the right to notify the head of the sponsoring institution or the funding body scientific misconduct or beaches of publication ethics be discovered during the processing of a manuscript for investigation. The GMJ itself will not be involved in the actual investigation or make determinations of misconduct. The Editor-in-Chief will notify the authors of the intention to report the suspicion of research misconduct or breach of publication ethics.

 

For any ethical issue, including authorship dispute, plagiarism complaints, concurrent publication, allegation of research errors and fraud, research standard violations, the Ghana Medical Journal will follow the recommendation of COPE. Articles may be retracted due to infringements of professional ethical codes including but not limited to multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism or fraudulent use of data.

 

OPEN ACCESS LICENSE NOTICE

Ghana Medical Journal is an Open Access journal and applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (Creative Commons Attribution License) 4.0 International. See details on the Creative Commons website (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) to articles and other content published in the Journal. 

 

By submitting your paper for publication in Ghana Medical Journal, you agree to have the CC BY license applied to your work. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/). This facilitates freedom in re-use and also ensures that Ghana Medical Journal content can be mined without barriers for the needs of research.

 

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Authors will retain copyright to articles submitted to the GMJ if accepted for publication and published. Authors will allow the journal to publish and archive the article under the CC BY license (Creative Commons Attribution License) 4.0 International.

GENERAL INFORMATION
Correspondence

All correspondence should be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief, Ghana Medical Journal, P. O. Box 1596, Accra, Ghana. Send e-mail correspondence to editor@ghanamedj.org


Peer Review

The journal uses blind peer-review and manuscripts should be anonymized for this purpose. Authors should submit the full manuscript devoid of authors names, institutional affiliations and acknowledgement. There should also be no headers or footers. This document should be uploaded as the Main document/file.

 

A second file containing Title, author information and affiliation, running and conflict of interest statement title should be uploaded as a Supplementary file.

 

Manuscripts that do not conform to the requirements of this journal shall be returned to the author(s) within two weeks from the date of submission. Returned manuscripts may be accepted for consideration if they are modified to an acceptable form.

 

Manuscripts are subject to peer-review and/or editorial revision to clarify content. As a general rule, each submission is sent to two experts in the subject area of the manuscript for peer review. Additional reviewers may be used if the peer review decisions are not in agreement. Manuscripts may also be sent to statisticians for the review of that aspect of the study. The Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision on all manuscripts guided by the peer reviewers and the Editors.

 

Appeals

Where authors disagree with a manuscript review decision, the Editor-in-Chief will have the decisions reviewed by another expert. The Editor-in-Chef makes the final decision.

 

Corrections

Requests for corrections to published articles should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief. Corrections will be reviewed and if approved published promptly.

 

Cover Letter or Submission Letter

The letter submitting the manuscript to the Editor-in-Chief should be on institutional letterhead; and signed by ALL authors. It must confirm the originality of the study and the fact that it has not been submitted to another journal for consideration or published elsewhere.

 

Reprints

There shall be no reprints as published articles may be freely downloaded from the journal website.

 

Charges
The Ghana Medical Journal does not charge manuscript processing or publication charges.


Frequency of Publishing
The Ghana Medical Journal is published quarterly online and in print.

 

SUBMISSION PREPARATION CHECKLIST

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

 

  1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  2. The submission file is in Microsoft Word document file format.
  3. Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  4. The text is single-spaced; uses a 10-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points rather than at the end.
  5. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Guide for Authors. 
  6. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.
  7. Author names should be First Name Middle Initial Surname (John B. Doe). Do not add titles and qualifications
  8. Give full institutional address of each author
  9. Provide information on Funding for the study
  10. Make sure Keywords are consistent with Medline MeSH expressions
  11. Research Ethics Approval All manuscripts should indicate the name, institution and reference number of ethical approvals obtained on the study protocol. In the online submission process one of the checklist items is to indicate that ethical approval was obtained for the research.
  12. Check citations in the text (Arabic numeral in superscript) 1 and make sure that citations at the end of a sentence are placed after the full stop NOT before it. They should NOT be in parentheses (), [ ] or underlined _.More than one citation should be separated by commas (,) like this1,2 If bibliographic software is used to generate the list of references make sure they are not placed as footnotes or endnotes.
  13. Check that the list of references is consistent with the citations and that the Journal names are in italics and as abbreviated as in Medline. The format is: Authors Title Journal Name Year; Volume (issue): pages
  14. Internet references should indicate date of accession.
  15. References to unpublished communications should be kept in the text and not listed in the list of references.
  16. Tables should contain information relevant to findings and not a long list of frequency data. Tables should be constructed using the Microsoft Word Table format in columns and rows. Data should NOT be separated with Tabs or spaces. Avoid putting legend/title to Table in the first row of the Table.
  17. Figures should be clearly labeled and with appropriate caption. Pie charts containing less than 4 variables should be reported in words in the text. Give Figures separate legends. Do NOT include the legend or title in the figure.
  18. Clinical and radiological images should be data size-minimized and presented in the JPEG format. They should be clear and sharp.

Journal Identifiers


eISSN:
print ISSN: 0016-9560