The Sierra Leone Journal of Medicine (SLJM) is an official publication of the University of Sierra Leone Teaching Hospitals Complex, Freetown. The journal serves as a local and international portal for the publication of scholarly research works with relevance to Medicine and Dentistry (basic and clinical medicine) and allied professional fields in Sierra Leone, Africa, as well as other parts of the world.

The SLJM publishes original papers that have not been previously published. It accepts articles in the following formats: scientific articles, reviews, communications, letters, and conference papers. Additionally, the journal may consider publishing articles in other formats in the future.

SLJM is an open-access journal.

Contributions to the journal shall be submitted in UK English only.

The Journal is issued two times a year.

The journal is currently indexed in Google Scholar.

Digital copies of the journal are archived in CrossRef.

Editorial Policies

EDITORIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

The Editor-in-Chief, with input from the Section Editor when indicated, is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the SLJM will be published. The Editor-in-Chief is guided by the Editorial Policy and constrained by legal requirements regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism.

The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to decide not to publish submitted manuscripts in case it is found that they do not meet relevant standards concerning the content and formal aspects. The Editorial Staff will inform the authors whether the manuscript is accepted for publication within             from the date of the manuscript submission.

The Editor-in-Chief must hold no conflict of interest regarding the articles they consider for publication. If an Editor perceives a potential conflict of interest in handling a submission, the Section Editor will be responsible for selecting reviewers and making all decisions on the manuscript. Members of the editorial committee and Editorial Advisers may publish articles in the SLJM, but they must not be involved in the decision-making process regarding their articles. Such articles must be blinded so that only the Editor-in-Chief is aware of the authorship. If the Editor-in-Chief has a conflict of interest, the Section Editor will make the decision.

The Editor, Editor-in-Chief, Section Editor, and Editorial Board shall evaluate manuscripts for their scientific content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

The Editor and the Editorial Staff must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

Editors and the Editorial Staff shall take all reasonable measures to ensure that the reviewers remain anonymous to the authors before, during and after the evaluation process and the authors remain anonymous to reviewers until the end of the review procedure.

AUTHORS’ RESPONSIBILITIES

Authors warrant that their manuscript is their original work, that it has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Parallel submission of the same manuscript to another journal constitutes misconduct and eliminates the manuscript from consideration by the SLJM. Please note that posting of preprints on preprint servers or repositories is not considered prior publication. Authors should disclose details of preprint posting upon submission of the manuscript. This must include a link to the location of the preprint. Should the submission be published, the authors are expected to update the information associated with the preprint version on the preprint server/repository to show that a final version has been published in the journal, including the DOI linking directly to the publication.

If a manuscript has previously been submitted elsewhere, authors should provide information about the previous reviewing process and its outcome. This provides an opportunity for editors to detail how subsequent revisions have taken into account previous reviews, and why certain reviewer comments were not taken into account. Information about the author’s previous reviewing experience is to the author’s advantage: it often helps the editors select more appropriate reviewers.

In case a submitted manuscript is a result of a research project, or its previous version has been presented at a conference in the form of an oral presentation (under the same or similar title), detailed information about the project, the conference, etc. shall be provided in a footnote or acknowledgement.

It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that manuscripts submitted to the SLJM are written with ethical standards in mind.  Authors affirm that the manuscript contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of third parties. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Reporting Standards

The SLJM is committed to serving the research community by ensuring that all articles include enough information to allow others to reproduce the work. A submitted manuscript should contain sufficient detail and references to permit reviewers and, subsequently, readers to verify the claims presented in it – e.g. provide complete details of the methods used, including time frames, etc. Authors are required to review the standards available for many research applications from Equator Network and use those that are relevant for the reported research applications. The deliberate presentation of false claims is a violation of ethical standards.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions and must make sure that they have permission from all involved parties to make the content public. Authors may be required to provide proof that they have obtained such permission. Authors are also exclusively responsible for the contents of their data/supplementary files.  Authors affirm that data protection regulations, ethical standards, third party copyright and other rights have been respected in the process of collecting, processing and sharing data.

Authors wishing to include figures, tables or other materials that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s). Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors. Authors may be required to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their manuscripts.

Authorship

Authors must make sure that only contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors and, conversely, that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors. If persons other than authors were involved in important aspects of the research project and the preparation of the manuscript, their contribution should be acknowledged in a footnote or the Acknowledgements section.

As a guide, authors should refer to the criteria for authorship that have been developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). In order to be named on the author list, one must have:

• made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• contributed to the drafting the work, or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• provided final approval of the version to be published; AND
• agreed 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; AND
• agreed to be named on the author list, and approved of the full author list.

Each author’s contribution must be detailed in the manuscript according to the fourteen possible contributor roles detailed on credit.niso.org.

The addition or removal of authors during the editorial process will only be permitted only if a justifiable explanation is provided to the editorial team and publisher. Attempts to introduce ‘ghost’, ‘gift’ or ‘honorary’ authorship will be treated as cases of misconduct.

Acknowledgment of sources

Authors are required to properly cite sources that have significantly influenced their research and their manuscript. Information received in a private conversation or correspondence with third parties, in reviewing project applications, manuscripts and similar materials, must not be used without the express written consent of the information source.

When citing or making claims based on data, authors should provide the reference to data in the same way as they cite publications. We recommend the format proposed by the FORCE11 Data Citation Principles.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, where someone assumes another’s ideas, words, or other creative expression as their own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism includes the following:

• Word for word, or almost word for word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author’s work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks);
• Copying equations, figures or tables from someone else’s paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism. We use the free version of Grammarly.

Any manuscript that shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected. Please see the journal’s Authors’ Instructions for a more detailed view of our policy on plagiarism.

In case plagiarism is discovered in a paper that has already been published by the journal, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described below under Retraction policy.

Conflict of interest

Authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might have influenced the presented results or their interpretation. If there is no conflict of interest to declare, the following standard statement should be added: ‘No competing interests were disclosed’.

A competing interest may be of non-financial or financial nature. Examples of competing interests include (but are not limited to):

• individuals receiving funding, salary or other forms of payment from an organization, or holding stocks or shares from a company, that might benefit (or lose) financially from the publication of the findings;
• individuals or their funding organization or employer holding (or applying for) related patents;
• official affiliations and memberships with interest groups relating to the content of the publication;
• political, religious, or ideological competing interests.

Authors from pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that sponsor clinical or field trials or other research studies, should declare these as competing interests on submission. The relationship of each author to such an organization should be explained in the ‘Competing interests’ section. Publications in the journal must not contain content advertising any commercial products.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in their own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal Editor or publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper.

By submitting a manuscript, the authors agree to abide by the SLJM’s Editorial Policies.

ORCID

The journal asks that all authors submitting a paper register an account with Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID). ORCID numbers for all authors and co-authors should be added to the author data upon submission and will be published alongside the submitted paper, should it be accepted.

ORCID registration provides a unique and persistent digital identifier for the account that enables accurate attribution and improves the discoverability of published papers, ensuring that the correct author receives the correct credit for their work.

Funding information

If a paper is the result of a funded project, authors are required to specify funding sources according to their contracts with the funder.

REVIEWERS’ RESPONSIBILITIES

Reviewers are required to provide written, competent and unbiased feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the manuscript.

The reviewers assess manuscript for compliance with the profile of the journal, the relevance of the investigated topic and applied methods, the originality and scientific relevance of information presented in the manuscript, the presentation style and scholarly apparatus.

Reviewers should alert the Editor to any well-founded suspicions or knowledge of possible violations of ethical standards by the authors. Reviewers should recognize relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors and alert the Editor to substantial similarities between a reviewed manuscript and any manuscript published or under consideration for publication elsewhere, in the event they are aware of such. Reviewers should also alert the Editor to a parallel submission of the same manuscript to another journal, in the event they are aware of such.

Reviewers must not have conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors, and/or the funding sources for the research. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the Editor without delay.

Any selected reviewer who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editor without delay.

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

Please see the journal’s Guidelines for Reviewers for a more detailed view of our policy on reviewer’s responsibilities.

Peer Review

The submitted manuscripts are subject to a peer review process. The purpose of peer review is to assist the Editorial Board in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communication with the author, it may also assist the author in improving the manuscript.

The SLJM employs a double-blind peer-review process, in which both the authors and the reviewers are blinded to each other’s identities.

Three to four peer reviewers are involved, and the decision to accept or reject a manuscript is based on the majority decision.

Reviewers are given two weeks to submit their reviews, with an additional one-week grace period. If no response is received within this timeframe, the manuscript may be reassigned unless valid reasons are provided.

We strive to complete the peer review process within a period of four to six weeks.

The choice of reviewers is at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief and the Section Editor. The reviewers must be knowledgeable about the subject area of the manuscript; they must not be from the authors’ own institution, and they should not have recent joint publications with any of the authors.

In the main review phase, the  editor sends submitted manuscripts to three-four reviewers who are experts in the field. The reviewers’ evaluation form contains a checklist in order to help reviewers cover all aspects that can determine the fate of a submission. In the final section of the evaluation form, the reviewers must include observations and suggestions aimed at improving the submitted manuscript; these are sent to authors, without the names of the reviewers.

All the reviewers of a manuscript act independently and they are not aware of each other’s identities.

During the review process, the Editor-in-Chief or Section Editor may require authors to provide additional information (including raw data) if they are necessary for the evaluation of the scholarly merit of the manuscript. These materials shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

The editorial team shall ensure reasonable quality control for the reviews. With respect to reviewers whose reviews are convincingly questioned by authors, special attention will be paid to ensure that the reviews are objective and high in academic standard. When there is any doubt with regard to the objectivity of the reviews or quality of the review, additional reviewers will be assigned.

Members of the editorial team/board/guest editors are permitted to submit their own papers to the journal. In cases where an author is associated with the journal, they will be removed from all editorial tasks for that paper and another member of the team will be assigned responsibility for overseeing peer review.

POST-PUBLICATION DISCUSSIONS

The SLJM encourages post-publication debate either through letters to the editor, or on an external moderated site, such as PubPeer.

Use of Large Language Models and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools

The SLJM conforms to the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) recommendations on chat bots, ChatGPT and scholarly manuscripts and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)’s position statement on Authorship and AI tools.

AI bots such as ChatGPT cannot be listed as authors on your submission.

Authors must clearly indicate the use of tools based on large language models and generative AI in the manuscript (which tool was used and for what purpose), preferably in the methods or acknowledgements sections.

Authors are responsible for the accuracy, validity, and appropriateness of any content generated by tools based on large language models and generative AI and they must ensure that the cited references are correct, and that the submission is free from plagiarism.

Editors and Reviewers must ensure the confidentiality of the peer review process. Editors must not share information about submitted manuscripts or peer review reports with any tools based on large language models and generative AI. Reviewers must not use any tools based on large language models and generative AI to generate review reports.

Procedures for dealing with complaints and appeals

Anyone may inform the editors and/or Editorial Staff at any time of suspected unethical behaviour or any type of misconduct by giving the necessary information/evidence to start an investigation.

INVESTIGATION

• Editor-in-Chief will consult with the Editorial Board on decisions regarding the initiation of an investigation.
• During an investigation, any evidence should be treated as strictly confidential and only made available to those strictly involved in investigating.
• The accused will always be given the chance to respond to any charges made against them.
• If it is judged at the end of the investigation that misconduct has occurred, then it will be classified as either minor or serious.

MINOR MISCONDUCT

Minor misconduct will be dealt directly with those involved without involving any other parties, e.g.:

• Communicating to authors/reviewers whenever a minor issue involving misunderstanding or misapplication of academic standards has occurred.
• A warning letter to an author or reviewer regarding fairly minor misconduct.

MAJOR MISCONDUCT

The Editor-in-Chief, in consultation with the Section Editors / Editorial Board, and, when appropriate, further consultation with a small group of experts should make any decision regarding the course of action to be taken using the evidence available. The possible outcomes are as follows (these can be used separately or jointly):

• Publication of a formal announcement or editorial describing the misconduct.
• Informing the author’s (or reviewer’s) head of department or employer of any misconduct by means of a formal letter.
• The formal, announced retraction of publications from the journal in accordance with the Retraction Policy (see below).
• A ban on submissions from an individual for a defined period.
• Referring a case to a professional organization or legal authority for further investigation and action.

When dealing with complaints and appeals, the editorial team will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE):  https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts.

RETRACTION POLICY

The infringement of the legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), the violation of of professional ethical codes and research misconduct, such as multiple submissions, duplicate or overlapping publication, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data and data fabrication, undisclosed use of tools based on large language models and generative AI, honest errors reported by the authors (for example, errors due to the mixing up of samples or use of a scientific tool or equipment that is found subsequently to be faulty), unethical research  or any major misconduct require retraction of an article. Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct errors in submission or publication.

For any retracted article, the reason for retraction and who is instigating the retraction will be clearly stated in the Retraction notice. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by the SLJM: in the electronic version of the retraction note, a link is made to the original article. In the electronic version of the original article, a link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged, save for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”

Research Data Policy

The SLJM encourages authors  to share research data that are required for confirming the results published in the manuscript and/or enhance the published manuscript under the principle ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’. We accept supporting software applications, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound or video clips, large appendices, data tables and other relevant items that cannot be included in the article.

Authors may submit research data together with the manuscript through our journal management system. In this case, the research data will be made available online to reviewers and published as supplementary data or on general purpose data repository such as OSF or Zenodo once the manuscript is accepted for publication. A DOI will be assigned to each research data file, enabling the research data to be cited the same way as  publications. Note that these materials will not be copy-edited or typeset: their appearance and format is entirely the author’s responsibility.

Alternatively, authors may deposit relevant data in a FAIR-compliant repository – institutional, disciplinary, or general-purpose. If you need assistance in finding a FAIR compliant repository, check these links: https://repositoryfinder.datacite.org/ and https://www.re3data.org/. Authors should also provide via the repository any information needed to replicate, validate, and/or reuse the results / their study and analysis of the research data. This includes details of any software, instruments and other tools used to process the results. Where possible, the tools and instruments themselves should also be provided.

Exceptions: We recognize that open sharing of data may not always be feasible. Exceptions to open access to research data underlying publications include the following: obligation to protect results, confidentiality obligations, security obligations, the obligation to protect personal data and other legitimate constraints. Where open access is not provided to the data needed to validate the conclusions of a publication that reports original results, authors should provide the relevant access needed to validate the conclusions to the extent the legitimate interests of all research participants and applicable constraints are safeguarded.

ETHICAL AND SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS

If data access is restricted for ethical or security reasons, the manuscript must include:

• a description of the restrictions on the data;
• what, if anything, the relevant Institutional Review Board (IRB) or equivalent said about the data sharing; and
• all necessary information required for a reader or reviewer to apply for access to the data and the conditions under which access will be granted.

Data protection issues

Where human data cannot be effectively de-identified, data must not be shared in order to protect participant privacy unless the individuals have given explicit written consent that their identifiable data can be made publicly available.

In instances where the data cannot be made available, the manuscript must include:

• an explanation of the data protection concern;
• any intermediary data that can be de-identified without compromising anonymity;
• what, if anything, the relevant Institutional Review Board (IRB) or equivalent said about data sharing; and
• where applicable, all necessary information required for a reader or peer reviewer to apply for access to the data and the conditions under which access will be granted.

Link to research data from a Data Availability Statement within the submitted paper, which will be made public upon publication. A ‘Data Availability Statement’ should be added to the submission, prior to the reference list, providing the details of the data availability, including the DOI linking to it. If the data is restricted in any way and/or is not being made available within the journal publication, a statement from the author should be provided to explain why.

Consider the following when depositing data related to a publication:

• Check whether a repository where the data is deposited has a sustainability model.
• The data must be deposited under an open license that permits unrestricted access (e.g., CC0, CC-BY). More restrictive licenses should only be used if there is a valid reason (e.g., legal).
• The deposited data must include a version that is in an open, non-proprietary format.
• The deposited data must have been labeled in such a way that a 3rd party can make sense of it (e.g., sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file).
• Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate Ethics Committee. The identity of the research subject should be anonymized whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian).

Open Access policy

The SLJM is an Open Access journal. All its content is available free of charge. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search the full text of articles, as well as to establish HTML links to them, without having to seek the consent of the author or publisher.

The journal does not charge any fees at submission, reviewing, and production stages.

SELF-ARCHIVING POLICY

Authors can deposit preprints (versions before peer review), Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) and/or Versions of Record (VoRs) in a repository of the authors’ choice (e.g. an institutional, disciplinary and general-purpose repository. etc.), author’s personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.), and/or departmental website prior or during the submission process, at any time after the acceptance of the manuscript and at any time after publication.

Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided and links must be made to the article’s DOI and the license.

Copyright and Licensing

Authors retain copyright of the published papers and grant to the publisher the non-exclusive right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media. Articles will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Authors can enter separate, additional contractual arrangements for non-exclusive distribution of the published paper (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

METADATA POLICY

The journal metadata are freely accessible to all, and freely reusable by all, under the terms of the Creative Commons Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in the published works do not express the views of the Editors and Editorial Staff. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in the articles. The publisher shall have no liability in the event of issuance of any claims for damages. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Developed by EIFL, inspired by:

• Principles of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing. Directory of Open Access Journals. https://doaj.org/apply/transparency/ (accessed 2023-01-06).
• Core practices. COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics. https://publicationethics.org/core-practices (accessed 2022-12-10).
• Policies. Open Research Europe. https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/about/policies (accessed 2022-11-08).
• Journal Policies. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. https://www.glossa-journal.org/site/journal-policies/ (accessed 2023-01-06).