Information For Authors

In preparing the document for submission, authors must comply with the guidelines of the Publication Standards and the rules of authorship. Athena - Health & Research Journal follows the established by the International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE) in its statement on authorship and contribution. Without prejudice to consulting the aforementioned document, all authors must meet the four criteria cumulatively for authorship and all those who meet the criteria must be identified as authors:
     a) substantial, direct contribution in the design, or in the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of the study data;
     b) involvement in the writing of the article, critical review of the content;
     c) approval of the final version to be published;
     d) agreement on responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of all parts of the work.
The corresponding author assumes responsibility for communication with the Journal during the process of manuscript submission, peer review and publication, ensuring that all administrative requirements, namely authorship details, ethics committee approval, research protocol registration documentation and conflict of interest declarations are duly completed. The corresponding author must respond to editorial requests throughout the submission and peer review process in a timely manner and must cooperate with any requests from the journal after publication.
The journal does not allow authors to be added, their order to be changed or the corresponding author to be changed after final acceptance of the article. Prior to final acceptance, if any author wishes to be removed, they must submit a letter signed by themselves indicating their wish to be excluded from the list of authors. Any change in the order of names in the article requires a letter signed by all the authors indicating their agreement.

Conflicts of interest
Authors are required to disclose all relationships or interests in relation to their work. All submitted manuscripts must include a Conflicts of Interest Statement in the Title Page, listing all financial and non-financial conflicts of interest. When authors have no conflict of interest, the statement should read "All authors declare no conflict of interest, financial or non-financial, to disclose". A conflicting interest exists when the research carried out by the authors may be influenced by personal or financial relationships with other people or organizations.
Potential conflicting financial interests include (but are not limited to): research grants from funding agencies (the research funder and grant number are required); financial support for educational programs; employment or appointment; advisory board or board of directors position or other management relationship; financial relationships (e.g. receiving reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that may in some way gain or lose financially from the publication of the article, now or in the future); intellectual property rights (e.g. patents, copyrights, and royalties from such rights); spousal and/or child holdings that may have a financial interest in the work.
In addition, non-financial interests that may be important to readers should be publicly disclosed. These may include, but are not limited to, competing political, personal, religious, ideological, academic and intellectual interests.
Editors may request further information relating to conflicting interests. Editors and reviewers are also required to declare any conflicting interests and will be excluded from the peer review process if a conflicting interest exists.

Human rights
Research involving human beings, human material or human data must include a statement that the studies were carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by an ethics committee, with an express indication of the number of this approval/authorization. If a study has received an exemption from the requirement for ethical approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript (including the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption). Authors are expected to have obtained ethics committee approval and informed patient consent for any experimental use of a new procedure or tool where a clear clinical advantage based on clinical need was not apparent prior to treatment. The submission of a declaration of compliance with research ethics requirements is waived for review studies.
The Journal encourages authors submitting clinical trial manuscripts to provide the registration number and name of the clinical trial. Reports of randomized clinical trials must present information on all the main elements of the study, including the protocol, allocation of interventions (randomization methods, concealment of allocation to treatment groups) and the method of concealment (blinding), based on the CONSORT statement.
Manuscripts may be rejected if the Editor considers that the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. In rare cases, Editors may contact the ethics committee for more information.

Informed consent
In all research involving humans, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from the participants. For all manuscripts that include details, images or videos relating to individual participants, written informed consent for their publication must be obtained from the participants. Identifying details (names, dates of birth, identity numbers and other information) of participants who have been studied should not be published in written descriptions, photographs and genetic profiles, unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the participant (parent or guardian if the participant is unfit) has given written informed consent for publication. The final decision on whether consent to publish is required rests with the Editor-in-Chief.

Originality and Duplicate Publication
Manuscripts under review or published by other journals will not be accepted for publication, and articles published in this journal may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any type of publication without permission from the Editorial Board. Figures and tables may be used freely if the original source is verified in accordance with the Creative Commons Non-Commercial License. It is mandatory that all authors resolve any copyright issues when citing a figure or table from a different journal that is not open access.

Process for managing research and publication misconduct
The Editorial Board will work ceaselessly to observe publication misconduct, such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, ethical problems with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author's idea or data, complaints against editors, among others. When the journal comes across suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, the resolution process will be guided by the guidelines provided by the "Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)". The full guidelines can be found on the COPE website: http://www.publicationethics.org.

Plagiarism
All authors are strongly recommended to check the content of their manuscripts before they are submitted to the Journal for publication. Authors can use valid and reliable plagiarism checking software to ensure that their manuscripts are free of plagiarism. In any case, all articles submitted to the Journal will be checked for plagiarism before final publication. If reviewers, editors-in-chief, readers or editorial teams suspect or perceive any kind of plagiarism at any stage of the publication process, the manuscript will be rejected and all authors, including the corresponding author, will be notified. Self-plagiarism is also considered and managed accordingly.
COPE's code of conduct and flowcharts will be used if any plagiarism is detected in a submitted manuscript or found in a published article.

Language of submission and English Revision
Papers must be submitted in English. Abstracts will also be published in Portuguese. Portuguese authors are kindly requested to submitt their abstracts also in Portuguese. Non-Portuguese speaking authors will have their abstracts translated to Portuguese at no cost. Authors may also request an english revision of their paper that will be provided at a fee. The same will apply when English language and style issues are identified during the peer-review proccess.
If authors choose to have their English language and style reviews conducted elsewhere, they are strongly encouraged to do so prior to submission.

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Conditions for Submission
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check that their submission complies with all the items listed below. Submissions that do not comply with the rules will be returned to the authors.

  • The contribution must be original and unpublished and not under review or for publication in another journal or scientific event.
  • The manuscript submitted to the Journal must not contain any data identifying the authors, and all the Blind Peer Review instructions must be respected.
  • There must be no conflicts of interest and if there has been any support it must be declared in the article.
  • The article must respect the ethical procedures relating to the preparation and publication of scientific work and the legislation in force on copyright.
  • Files for submission must be in Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or RTF format (as long as they do not exceed 2MB).
  • The text must be in A4 format (21cm by 29.7cm), justified, Calibri font, size 11 and 1.5 spacing.
  • The title should be a maximum of 15 words.
  • All verbatim citations and paraphrases must comply with the American Medical Association (AMA) style.
  • The text must follow the style standards and bibliographic requirements described in the Instructions to Authors.
  • Authors must authorize the indexing of the article in databases of national or international networks in which the Journal may or will be indexed.
  • Authors are responsible for any infraction inherent in the principles described above, or others that harm the Journal and the principles of rigor of the scientific community.
  • Authors must authorize the use of their personal data for the purposes of managing, disseminating and sharing the article with all databases to which the Journal is indexed.

Preparation of manuscript files for submission

Authors are strongly advised to download the provided docx model file and use it for preparing the file to be submitted as it will make it easier to comply with the instructions here provided.
It is mandatory to submit a "Title page" indicating the title of the article, identification of the authors (full name, affiliation and ORCID identifier and identification and email address of the corresponding author) and contributions to the article according to the Contributor Roles Taxonomy which can be found at https://credit.niso.org/. The Compliance with Ethical Standards should be presented including the following: funding, conflict of interests, ethical approval and informed consent (if appliable).
It is suggested that support, funding or external collaborations be mentioned in the acknowledgements section, which should appear on the Title Page.
Authors should include a data availability statement at the end of the text of the article and before the bibliographical references, stating where the data supporting the results can be found or stating that it will be provided on request.
Registration on a public clinical trial registration platform approved by the World Health Organization is a necessary condition for publishing clinical trial data in the Athena - Health & Research Journal, in accordance with ICMJE recommendations. Clinical trials must be registered before the start of the participant recruitment period ("prospective trial registration"). Purely observational studies do not require registration. The clinical trial registration number and the date of registration must be mentioned at the end of the article's abstract.
Articles must be submitted exclusively in English, including the title, abstract and keywords. The text must be typed, Calibri font, size 11, 1.5 spacing, justified, A4 pages, without bold and underlining, font variation, colored backgrounds. The original article may not exceed 4000 words, excluding references, tables and figures. For review articles, up to 6000 words will be allowed, excluding references, tables and figures. More than half of the references must refer to evidence produced in the last five years.
Tables and figures should only be included if absolutely necessary for understanding the article and are limited to a maximum of five. They must be identified throughout the text and numbered in order of inclusion. Tables must be numbered and titled in the header and have simple formatting. Figures must be identified in the footer and be of sufficient quality to be included in the text. If they contain abbreviations, they must be shown in the footnotes.

Articles should contain the following sections: Title, Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusion and References.

  • Title: maximum 15 words.
  • Abstract: maximum 250 words. It should be divided into the following sections: Introduction, Objectives, Methodology, Results and Conclusion. The abstract should not include references or abbreviations.
  • Keywords: maximum of six, according to MeSH descriptors (available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/MBrowser.html and/or http://decs.bvs.br/).
  • Introduction: Presentation of the state of the art regarding the topic under study, statement of the problem, arguments of relevance according to the literature and objectives of the study.
  • Methodology: Type of study, design, sample and sampling, participants, data collection and processing instruments, procedures and ethical and legal considerations.
  • Results: Presentation and analysis of the data, with rigor in its analysis.
  • Discussion: Comparative analysis of the results with existing knowledge on the subject and the relevance of new knowledge emerging from the study.
  • Conclusion: Conclusions related to the research objectives/questions/hypotheses and should support or refute the theme studied and presented in the article. It should also include the limitations of the study, implications for health sciences, education, research and clinical practice and suggestions for future research. Acknowledgements (optional): All the financial, technical, personal and/or institutional support that contributed to the development of the work, but which does not carry authorship weight, should be highlighted.
  • Bibliographic referencing standards: - follow the most recent edition of the model recommended by the American Medical Association (AMA). References must be primary sources, included in the text - secondary sources (e.g. cited in) are not accepted. A number is assigned to a source in the order in which it is cited in the text. If the source is cited again, the same number is used. Arabic numerals should be used in superscript next to the paraphrase or quotation to be referenced (example1,2). It is advisable to include a reference published in the journal. Reference numbers should be inserted to the left in the case of a colon or semicolon and to the right or outside of commas and periods. In the case of citations of more than one reference at the same time, list each reference number separated by a comma or a dash for a sequence of consecutive numbers. There should be no spaces between commas or dashes. The list of bibliographical references is listed in numerical order, in the same order in which they are cited in the text.

Authors are encouraged to use the Standard Reporting Guidelines when preparing their articles. Depending on the type of study, they can use the following links:

  • Randomized Trials: CONSORT
  • Observational studies: STROBE
  • Systematic reviews and meta-analysis of experimental studies: PRISMA
  • Systematic reviews and meta-analysis of observational studies: MOOSE
  • Diagnostic accuracy studies: STARD
  • Qualitative research: COREQ
  • Quality Improvement Studies: SQUIRE
  • For others consult here

 

Copyright Notice
Authors submitting proposals to the Journal must agree to the following terms:

  • The articles are published under the Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC), conforming open-access regime, without any cost to the author or the reader.
  • The authors retain the copyright and grant the Journal the right of first publication, allowing the free sharing of the work, provided that it is correctly attributed to authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are authorized to assume additional contracts separately, for non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the Journal (ex.: publish in institutional repository or as a book chapter), with recognition of authorship and initial publication in the Journal.
  • Authors are allowed and encouraged to publish and distribute their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their personal page) as this can generate productive changes, as well as increase the impact and citation of the published work.