Submissions

Author Guidelines

EDITORIAL POLICY
The "Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute" is the official journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute, Peshawar, Pakistan. We are dedicated to encourage and facilitate research at all levels and in all fields of medicine. We are predominantly devoted to reporting original investigations in the biomedical and health sciences, including research in the basic sciences; clinical trials of therapeutic agents; effectiveness of diagnostic or therapeutic techniques; or studies relating to the behavioral, epidemiological or educational aspects of medicine. We consider articles on all topics pertaining to various disciplines of medicine for publication. Our goal is to provide the reader reports of original research conducted nationally and internationally, original clinical observations accompanied by analysis and discussion, analysis of philosophical, ethical, or social aspects of the health professions or biomedical sciences, critical reviews, case reports with discussions and feedback on articles in the form of letters to editors. The journal is intended primarily for those in the health professions: researchers, practitioners, educators, administrators, and students. The phrase health professionals includes physicians, nurses, dentists, veterinarians, and the many types of allied health professionals in the research and health care delivery systems. We especially encourage local research which has international application and contributes positively to the knowledge of diseases and problems not commonly encountered in the west.

MANUSCRIPTS SUBMISSION

The "Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute" is a peer reviewed quarterly journal and follows the uniform requirements for Manuscripts submitted to Biomedical journals as approved by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors as revised in 1997 published in N Eng J Med 1997; 336:309-15. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has produced and updated the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts (URM) Submitted to Biomedical Journals". Detailed information can be downloaded from www.icmje.org. 

All manuscripts should be accompanied by a covering letter from the author responsible for correspondence regarding the manuscript. The covering letter should contain the following copyright disclosure statement. We, the undersigned co-authors of this article, have contributed significantly to and share in the responsibility for above. The undersigned stipulate that the material submitted to Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute is new, original and has not been submitted to another publication for concurrent consideration. Upon acceptance by Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute, all copyright ownership for the article is transferred to Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute. It is attested that all human and/or animal studies undertaken as a part of the research are in compliance with regulation of our institution(s) and with generally accepted guidelines governing such work. It is attested that we have disclosed any and all financial or other relationships which could be construed as a conflict of interest and that all sources of financial support for this study have been disclosed and are indicated in the acknowledgment. This statement must be signed by all the major co authors. The covering letter should also contain statement that the manuscript has been seen and approved by all authors and should give any additional information which may be helpful to the Editor. If there has been any prior publication of any part of the work, this should be acknowledgement and appropriate written permission included. The journal is approved by Pakistan Medical & Dental Council and indexed with MEDLIP. It is available online on www.jpmi.org and www.pakmedinet.com/jpmi.

UNDERTAKING / COPYRIGHT FORM: Download this form, complete it and sign it. Send us the Scanned copy of it with your submission. File should be submitted as Supplementary file.

Download Undertaking / Copyright Form of JPMI

FORMAT REQUIREMENTS

While submitting manuscripts, please carefully follow the instructions given below: 

Summary of Technical Requirements

1. The journal will accept: 
(a) Original research articles (b) Review articles (c) Special Articles (d) Short Comminication (e) Case reports (f) Case Series (g) Letter to the Editor and (h) Editorials. 
2. It should be typed in double space on one side of the A-4 size paper with clear margins on both sides. 
3. Begin each section or component on a new page. 
4. Review the sequence: title page, abstract and key words, text, acknowledgments, references, tables (each on separate page), legends.
5. Illustrations, un-mounted prints, should not be larger than 203 í— 254 mm (8 í— 10 inches). 
6. Include permission to reproduce previously published material or to use illustrations that may identify human subjects. 
7. Keep copies of everything submitted. 

All manuscripts of original research should contain following sections:
a) Title Page
The title page should carry 
1) The title of the article, which should be concise but informative. 
2) Full name of each author, with his or her highest academic degree(s) and institutional affiliation.
3) The name of the department(s) and institution(s) to which the work should be attributed.
4) Disclaimers, if any. 
5) The name and address of the author responsible for correspondence about the manuscript. 
6) The name and address of the author to whom requests for reprints should be 
addressed source(s) of support in the form of grants, equipment, drugs, or all of these. 
7) A short running head or foot line of no more than 40 characters (count letters and spaces) at the foot of the title page. 
b) Abstract and Key Words
The second page should carry structured abstract of not more than 250 words. 
The abstract should state the objective: purpose of the study or investigation, methodology: basic procedures as selection of study subjects or laboratory animals; observational and analytical methods; results: main findings giving specific data and their statistical significance, conclusion: and the principal conclusions. It should emphasize new and important aspects of the study or observations. Below the abstract authors should provide, and identify as such, 3 to 10 key words or short phrases that will assist indexers in cross-indexing the article and may be published with the abstract. Terms from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) list of Index Medicus should be used; if suitable MeSH terms are not yet available for recently introduced terms, present terms may be used. 
c) Introduction
State the purpose of the article and summarize the rationale for the study or observation. Give only strictly pertinent references and do not include data or conclusions from the work being reported. 
d) Methodology
Describe your selection of the observational or experimental subjects (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) clearly. Identify the age, sex, and other important characteristics of the subjects. Because the relevance of such variables as age, sex, and ethnicity to the object of research is not always clear, authors should explicitly justify them when they are included in a study report. The guiding principle should be clarity about how and why a study was done in a particular way. For example, authors should explain why only subjects of certain ages were included or why women were excluded. Authors should avoid terms such as "race," which lacks precise biological meaning, and use alternative descriptors such as "ethnicity" or "ethnic group" instead. Authors should specify carefully what the descriptors mean, and tell exactly how the data were collected (for example, what terms were used in survey forms, whether the data were self-reported or assigned by others, etc.). Identify the methods, apparatus (give the manufacturer's name and address in parentheses), and procedures in sufficient detail to allow other workers to reproduce the results. Give references to established methods, including statistical methods (see below); provide references and brief descriptions for methods that have been published but are not well known; describe new or substantially modified methods, give reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations. Identify precisely all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration. Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol (study population, interventions or exposures, outcomes, and the rationale for statistical analysis), assignment of interventions (methods of randomization, concealment of allocation to treatment groups), and the method of masking (blinding). Authors submitting review manuscripts should include a section describing the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting, and synthesizing data. These methods should also be summarized in the abstract.
Ethics
When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 1983. Do not use patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. When reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether the institution's or a national research council's guide for, or any national law on, the care and use of laboratory animals was followed. The provision of Ethical Approval Report is a MUST, for all the Original Articles, after 1st January 2014.

Statistics
Describe statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to verify the reported results. When possible, quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). Avoid relying solely on statistical hypothesis testing, such as the use of P values, which fails to convey important quantitative information. Discuss the eligibility of experimental subjects. Give details about randomization. Describe the methods for and success of any blinding of observations. Report complications of treatment. Give numbers of observations. Report losses to observation (such as dropouts from a clinical trial). References for the design of the study and statistical methods should be to standard works when possible (with pages stated) rather than to papers in which the designs or methods were originally reported. Specify any general-use computer programs used. Put a general description of methods in the Methods section. When data are summarized in the Results section, specify the statistical methods used to analyze them. Restrict tables and figures to those needed to explain the argument of the paper and to assess its support. Use graphs as an alternative to tables with many entries; do not duplicate data in graphs and tables. Avoid nontechnical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as "random" (which implies a randomizing device), "normal," "significant," "correlations," and "sample." Define statistical terms, abbreviations, and most symbols. 
e) Results
Present your results in logical sequence in the text, tables, and illustrations. Do not repeat in the text all the data in the tables or illustrations; emphasize or summarize only important observations. 
f) Discussion
Emphasize the new and important aspects of the study and the conclusions that follow from them. Do not repeat in detail data or other material given in the Introduction or the Results section. Include in the Discussion section the implications of the findings and their limitations, including implications for future research. Relate the observations to other relevant studies. Link the conclusions with the goals of the study but avoid unqualified statements and conclusions not completely supported by the data. In particular, authors should avoid making statements on economic benefits and costs unless their manuscript includes economic data and analyses. Avoid claiming priority and alluding to work that has not been completed. State new hypotheses when warranted, but clearly label them as such. Recommendations, when appropriate, may be included. 
g) Acknowledgments
List all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship, such as a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. Groups of persons who have contributed materially to the paper but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be listed under a heading such as "clinical investigators" or "participating investigators," and their function or contribution should be described for example, "served as scientific advisors," "critically reviewed the study proposal," "collected data," or "provided and cared for study patients." Because readers may infer their endorsement of the data and conclusions, all persons must have given written permission to be acknowledged. 

Contributors from other departments/ institutes in a single-center study should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgement section unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.
h) References
References should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text. Identify references in text, tables, and legends by Arabic numerals in parentheses. References cited only in tables or figure legends should be numbered in accordance with the sequence established by the first identification in the text of the particular table or figure. Use the style of the examples below, which are based on the formats used by the NLM in Index Medicus. The titles of journals should be abbreviated according to the style used in Index Medicus. Consult the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus, published annually as a separate publication by the library and as a list in the January issue of Index Medicus. The list can also be obtained through the library's web site Avoid using abstracts as references. References to papers accepted but not yet published should be designated as "in press" or "forthcoming"; authors should obtain written permission to cite such papers as well as verification that they have been accepted for publication. Information from manuscripts submitted but not accepted should be cited in the text as "unpublished observations" with written permission from the source. Avoid citing a "personal communication" unless it provides essential information not available from a public source, in which case the name of the person and date of communication should be cited in parentheses in the text. For scientific articles, authors should obtain written permission and confirmation of accuracy from the source of a personal communication. The references must be verified by the author(s) against the original documents. The Uniform Requirements style (the Vancouver style) is based largely on an ANSI standard style adapted by the NLM for its databases. Notes have been added where Vancouver style differs from the style now used by NLM. 
Articles in Journals
1. Standard journal article List the first six authors followed by et al. Khan WA, Pervez K, Shah KA. Doppler patterns in cardiac tamponade. JPMI 1998;11: 153- More than six authors: Parkin DM, Clayton D, Black RJ, Masuyer E, Friedl HP, Ivanov E, et al. Childhood leukaemia in Europe after Chernobyl: 5 year follow-up. Br J Cancer 1996;73: 1006-12. 
2. Organization as author The Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand. Clinical exercise stress testing. Safety and performance guidelines. Med J Aust 1996; 164: 282-4. 
3. No author given Cancer in South Africa [editorial]. S Afr Med J 1994;84:15. 
4. Article not in English (Note: NLM translates the title to English, encloses the translation in square brackets, and adds an abbreviated language designator.) Ryder TE, Haukeland EA, Solhaug JH. Bilateral infrapatellar seneruptur hostidligere frisk kvinne. Tidsskr Nor Laegeforen 1996;116:41-2. 
5. Issue with no volume Turan I, Wredmark T, Fellander-Tsai L. Arthroscopic ankle arthrodesis in rheumatoid arthritis. Clin Orthop 1995;(320):110-4. 
6. No issue or volume Browell DA, Lennard TW. Immunologic status of the cancer patient and the effects of blood transfusion on antitumor responses. Curr Opin Gen Surg 1993: 325-33.7. 
7. Article containing retraction Garey CE, Schwarzman AL, Rise ML, Seyfried TN. Ceruloplasmin gene defect associated with epilepsy in EL mice [retraction of Garey CE, Schwarzman AL, Rise ML, Seyfried TN. In: Nat Genet 1994;6:426-31]. Nat Genet 1995;11:104.
8. Article with published erratum Hamlin JA, Kahn AM. Herniography in symptomatic patients following inguinal hernia repair [published erratum appears in West J Med 1995;162:278]. West J Med 1995;162:28-31. 
Books and Other Monographs 
9. Personal author(s) Ringsven MK, Bond D. Gerontology and leadership skills for nurses. 2nd ed. Albany 
(NY): Delmar Publishers; 1996. 
10. Editor(s), compiler(s) as author Norman IJ, Redfern SJ, editors. Mental health care for elderly people. New York: Churchill Livingstone; 1996. 
11. Organization as author and publisher Institute of Medicine (US). Looking at the future of the Medicaid program. Washington: The Institute; 1992. 
12. Chapter in a book (Note: Previous Vancouver style had a colon rather than a p before pagination.) Phillips SJ, Whisnant JP. Hypertension and stroke. In: Laragh JH, Brenner BM, editors. Hypertension: pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management. 2nd ed. New York: Raven Press;1995. p. 465-78. 
13. Conference proceedings Kimura J, Shibasaki H, editors. Recent advances in clinical neurophysiology. Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of EMG and Clinical Neurophysiology; 1995 Oct 15-19; Kyoto, Japan. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 1996.
14. Scientific or technical report Issued by funding/sponsoring agency: Smith P, Golladay K. Payment for durable medical equipment billed during skilled nursing facility stays. Final report. Dallas (TX): Dept. of Health and Human Services (US), Office of Evaluation and Inspections; 1994 Oct. Report No.: HHSIGOEI69200860. Issued by performing agency: Field MJ, Tranquada RE, Feasley JC, editors. Health services research: work force and educational issues. Washington: National Academy Press; 1995. Contract No.: AHCPR282942008. Sponsored by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. 
i) Illustrations and legends
Illustrations should be numbered in the order of their mention in the text and should be marked lightly on the back with the first author's last name and an arrow to indicate the top edge. Special charges will be made by the publisher for publishing figures in color. Before publication the corresponding author will be sent a cost estimate; at that time he or she may decide to pay the costs or print the illustration in black and white. Only good photographic prints of original drawings should be supplied. All lettering must be done professionally. Do not send original artwork, x-ray films, or ECG tracings. Glossy photographs are preferred; good black-and-white contrast is essential. Preferred size for submitted illustrations is 5 x 7 inches. Suitable figure legends should be typewritten double spaced on a separate sheet of paper and included at the end of the manuscript. If a figure has been taken from previously copyrighted material, the legend must give full credit to the original source and letters of permission must be submitted with the manuscript. Articles appear in both the print and online versions of the Journal, and wording of the letter should specify permission in all forms and media. Failure to get electronic permission rights may result in the images not appearing in the online version. Illustrations cannot be returned by the publisher. Figures should be submitted in electronic format. All images should be at least 5 inches wide. Graphics software such as Photoshop and Illustrator, not presentation software such as PowerPoint, CorelDraw, or Harvard Graphics, should be used in the creation of the art. Color images need to be CMYK, at least 300 DPI, and be accompanied by a digital color proof, not a color laser print or color photocopy. Please include hardware and software information, in addition to the file names.
j) Tables
Tables should be self-explanatory and numbered in Roman numerals in the order of their mention in the text. Provide a brief title for each. Type each double-spaced on a separate page. Abbreviations should be defined in a double-spaced footnote at the end of the table. If any material in a table or a table itself has been taken from previously copyrighted material, a double spaced footnote must give full credit to the original source and permission of the author and publisher must be obtained. Send letters of permission to the Editor with the manuscript.
k) Short Reports
Short Reports should be limited to three type written pages on current research, a short introduction, material and methods andresults should be written under the same heading followed by brief comments and six to ten reference.
l) Letters to the Editor
Letters to the Editor are considered for publication (subject to editing and abridgment) provided they do not contain material that has been submitted or published elsewhere. The letter must be typewritten and double-spaced. Its text, not including reference, must not exceed 250 words if it is in reference to a recent journal article, or 400 words in all other cases (please provide a word count). It must have no more than five references and one figure or table. Letters referring to a recent journal article must be received within four weeks of its publication. Please include your full address, telephone number, fax number an e-mail address.

PEER REVIEW
Journal of Postgraduate Medical Institute is a peer reviewed journal. All articles on receipt for publication are immediately acknowledged but that does not imply acceptance for publication. Submitted manuscripts are reviewed for originality, relevance, statistical methods, significance, adequacy of documentation, reader interest and composition. Manuscript not submitted according to the instructions will be returned to the author for correction prior to beginning the peer review process. All manuscripts considered suitable for review are evaluated by a minimum of two reviewers who may take a couple of months time to review the manuscript. Secrecy of authors is maintained. Revised manuscripts are judged on the adequacy of responses to suggestions and criticisms made during the initial review. All accepted manuscripts are subject to editing for scientific accuracy and clarity by the office of the Editor. When the manuscript is deemed fit for publication, letter of acceptance is issued to the author. The ultimate authority to accept or reject the manuscript rests with the Editor.

CHECKLIST FOR THE AUTHOR
• Covering letter (should include section for which manuscript is submitted) 
• Undertaking Form completely filled and signed by all authors 
• Title page containing title of manuscript and short running title, if any (40 characters or fewer)
• Authors' academic degrees, and affiliations
• Author to whom correspondence and reprint requests are to be sent, including address, business phone and fax numbers, and e-mail address 
• Structured abstract, (Including Objective, Methodology, Results and Conclusion). It should not be more than 250 words. 
• Text (including Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion and Conclusion) 
• References 
• Illustrations, properly labeled 
• Legends 
• Tables (provide brief title for each), typed on separate sheets
• Disclosure regarding source of funding and conflict of interest, if any
• Approval of the study from respective Ethics Committee/ Institution Review Board
• Informed consent to publish patient photographs
• All RCTs should be prepared according to CONSORT guidelines
• Permission to reproduce published material in all forms and media