Author Guidelines

AUTHOR GUIDELINES

AJPT takes very seriously and strongly discourages:

• Duplicate publication or substantial plagiarism.
• Unnecessary separation of data from one study into several publications.
• Publication of studies that offer a very limited advance on previously published work.

These issues are generally grounds for rejection of a manuscript, and authors are asked to take note.

Whereas duplicate publication may be justified in some cases - for example a paper published in conference proceedings and thereafter in a peer-reviewed journal - the duplication must be declared to editors on submission and to readers on publication by full reference to the original version of the article.

Authorship

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.

Authorship credit should be based on:

• substantial contributions to study conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
• drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
• final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.

Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

Editors may ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict-of-interest disclosure forms. The Editors may also request that one or more authors, referred to as “guarantors,” be identified as the persons who take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article, and may publish this information.

The first author should be the one with the most substantial contribution to the paper while the last author should be the supervisor/ recognized specialist in the area of study.

NB:

Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship.

Contributors Listed in Acknowledgments

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chairperson who provided only general administrative support.

Corresponding authors should declare whether they had assistance with study design, data collection, data analysis, or manuscript preparation. If such assistance was available, the authors should disclose the identity of the individuals who provided this assistance and the entity that supported it in the published article.

Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.

Peer Review

AJPT is a peer-reviewed journal committed to the unbiased, independent, critical assessment of all scholarly work -including the scientific process – submitted to it for publication. All manuscripts are therefore subjected to Peer Review.

Ethical considerations

• Patients and Study Participants

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be violated without informed consent.

Identifying information, will not be published unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Patient consent shall be written and archived with the authors, who shall then provide AJPT with a written statement that attests that they have received and archived written patient consent.

When informed consent has been obtained, it shall be indicated in the published article.

When reporting experiments on human research participants , authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013. Ethical approval from the relevant ethics committee is mandatory.

• Authors and Reviewers

Manuscripts will be reviewed with due respect for authors’ confidentiality, with no disclosure of any confidential details during review of their manuscript. AJPT undertakes not to disclose information about manuscripts (including their receipt, content, status in the reviewing process, criticism by reviewers, or ultimate fate) to anyone other than the authors and reviewers.

Reviewers are not allowed to make copies of the manuscript for their files and are prohibited from sharing it with others, except with the editor’s permission. Reviewers should return or destroy copies of manuscripts after submitting reviews.

Editors will not keep copies of rejected manuscripts.

Copyright

All articles published by AJPT are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. Authors of articles transfer their copyrights to the publisher of AJPT.

Submission of a manuscript to AJPT implies that readily reproducible material described in the manuscript will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes. The source (article and journal citation) of such material must however be acknowledged.

PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPTS

A: ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLES

The entire manuscript, including title page, abstract, tables, figure legends and references, should be prepared double- spaced in a Times New Roman 12- point font, with 1 inch margins.  All pages should be numbered. The manuscript length should not exceed 3000 words for the text only (excluding abstract, acknowledgments, figure legends, and references) – justification must be provided for any manuscripts that exceed this length.

The general requirements listed in the next section relate to reporting essential elements for all study designs. Authors are encouraged also to consult reporting guidelines relevant to their specific research design. A good source of reporting guidelines is the EQUATOR Network (http://www.equator-network.org/home/).

Title Page

The title page should have the following information:

1. Article title. Authors should avoid long, convoluted titles, as well as titles that are too short and lack important information (e.g. study design, important in identifying randomized, controlled trials). Authors should include all information in the title that will make electronic retrieval of the article both sensitive and specific. Avoid abbreviations in the title of the manuscript.
2. Names and institutional affiliations of ALL Authors’.
3. Contact information for corresponding authors. The name, mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address of the author responsible for correspondence about the manuscript (the “corresponding author”). The corresponding author should indicate clearly whether his or her e-mail address can be published.
4. Word counts. A word count for the text only (excluding abstract, acknowledgments, figure legends, and references), and a separate word count for the Abstract.
5. Source(s) of support in the form of grants, equipment, drugs, or all of these.
6. Conflict of interest disclosure: all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest. Disclosure of such relationships is also important in connection with editorials and review articles. AJPT shall publish this information if it is important in judging the manuscript.
7. Disclaimers, if any.
8. List of abbreviations: Use only standard abbreviations. The spelled-out abbreviation followed by the abbreviation in parenthesis should be used when it is first mentioned in the text unless the abbreviation is a standard unit of measurement.

Abstract

The abstract should be of no more than 300 words.

Structured abstracts are required for original research articles and systematic reviews - sub-divided into background, objectives, methodology, results, discussion and conclusion.

The abstract should provide the context or background for the study and should state the study’s purpose, basic procedures (selection of study subjects or laboratory animals, observational and analytical methods), main findings (giving specific effect sizes and their statistical significance, if possible), principal conclusions, and funding sources. It should emphasize new and important aspects of the study or observations.

Because abstracts are the only substantive portion of the article indexed in many electronic databases, and the only portion many readers read, authors need to be careful that they accurately reflect the content of the article.

Authors should include 3-5 key words at the end of the abstract.

Introduction

The Introduction should provide a context or background for the study (that is, the nature of the problem and its significance) and state the specific purpose or research objective of, or hypothesis tested by, the study or observation. Both the main and secondary objectives should be clear. Authors should provide only directly pertinent references, and should not include data or conclusions from the work being reported.

Same or very similar work should be referred to specifically and referenced in the new paper.

Authors  may wish to divide their article into sections and subsections (perhaps even sub-subsections). Headings should reflect the relative importance of the sections. Note that text runs on after a 3^rd order heading.

 Methods

The Methods section should include only information on the plan or protocol for the study; all information obtained during the study belongs in the Results section. 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.

As appropriate:

• Describe the methods in sufficient detail to allow others 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 the reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations.
• Identify precisely all drugs/chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration.
• Authors should describe the selection of the observational or experimental participants (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) clearly, including eligibility and exclusion criteria and a description of the source population. Because the relevance of such variables as age and sex to the object of research is not always clear, authors should explain their use when they are included in a study report—for example, authors should explain why only participants of certain ages were included or why for instance women were excluded (if this was pertinent to the study). The guiding principle should be clarity about how and why a study was undertaken in a particular way. When authors use such variables as race or ethnicity, they should define how they measured these variables and justify their relevance.
• Describe the statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to verify the reported results.

Results

Results should be presented in a logical sequence in the text, tables, and illustrations, giving the main or most important findings first. Do not repeat all the data in the tables or illustrations in the text; emphasize or summarize only the most important observations. This will help keep within the word limit.

When data are summarized in the Results section, give numeric results not only as derivatives (for example, percentages) but also as the absolute numbers from which the derivatives were calculated, and specify the statistical methods used to analyze them.

Restrict tables and figures to those absolutely needed to explain the argument of the paper and to assess supporting data. Use graphs as an alternative to tables with many entries; do not duplicate data in graphs and tables.

Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as “random” (which implies a randomizing device), “normal,” “significant,” “correlations,” and “sample.”

Where scientifically appropriate, analyses of the data by such variables as age and sex should be included.

Extra or supplementary materials and technical details can be provided as an appendix where they will be accessible but will not interrupt the flow of the text, or can be published separately in the electronic version of the journal.

Discussion and Conclusion

Emphasize the new and important aspects of the study and the conclusions that follow from them in the context of the totality of the best available evidence.

Do not repeat in detail data or other information given in the Introduction or the Results section.

For experimental studies, it is useful to begin the discussion by briefly summarizing the main findings, then explore possible mechanisms or explanations for these findings, compare and contrast the results with other relevant studies, state the limitations of the study, and explore the implications of the findings for future research and for clinical practice.

Link the conclusions with the goals of the study but avoid unqualified statements and conclusions not adequately supported by the data. In particular, avoid making statements on economic benefits and costs unless the manuscript includes the appropriate economic data and analyses. Avoid claiming priority or alluding to work that has not been completed.

Conflict of Interest declaration

Please also insert a Conflict of Interest Statement at the end of your manuscript, preceding any Acknowledgements and References using the phrase, “We declare that we have no conflict of interest” or alternatively state your conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chairperson who provided only general support.

As mentioned, corresponding authors should declare whether they had assistance with study design, data collection, data analysis, or manuscript preparation. If such assistance was available, the authors should disclose the identity of the individuals who provided this assistance and the entity that supported it in the published article.

Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.

References

• General Considerations

Although references to review articles can be an efficient way to guide readers to a body of literature, review articles do not always reflect original work accurately. Authors should therefore provide direct references to original research sources whenever possible.

However, authors should avoid extensive lists of references to original work on a topic – a small numbers of references to key original papers often serve just as well.

References to papers accepted but not yet published should be designated as “in press”; authors should obtain written permission to cite such papers as well as verification that they have been accepted for publication. Any 'in press' articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers' assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the journal.

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, obtain written permission and confirmation of accuracy from the source of a personal communication.

Authors are responsible for the accuracy of references cited, and for checking that none of the references cite retracted articles except in the context of referring to the retraction.

• In-text citation

The references should be cited in the text by giving the first author’s name (or the first and second if they are the only authors) and the year of publication (e.g., Griffin et al, 1991; Brain and Grant, 2004; Wallace, 2006).

If reference is made to more than one publication by the same author(s) in the same year, suffixes (a, b, c, etc.) should be added to the year in the text citation and in the references list.

• Reference list

This should appear at the end of the manuscript

References should be listed alphabetically by author and not numbered, i.e. the Harvard classification.  Use Medline journal title abbreviations. The names of all authors should be given in the reference list.

The reference list should be stylized in the following format:

Brain SD and Grant AD (2004). Vascular actions of calcitonin gene-related peptide and adrenomedullin. Physiol. Rev. 84: 903-34.

Food and Drug Administration. Potentially life-threatening serotonin syndrome with combined use of SSRIs or SNRIs and triptan medications. www.fda.gov/cder/drug/InfoSheets/HCP/triptansHCP.htm  (Accessed 11 Nov 2009).

Goldstein DB, Tate SK and Sisodiya SM (2003). Pharmacogenetics goes genomic. Nat. Rev. Genet. 4: 937-47. [Erratum, Nat. Rev. Genet. 2004; 5:76.]

Griffin MR, Piper JM, Daugherty JR, Snowden M and Ray WA (1991). Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use and increased risk for peptic ulcer disease in elderly persons. Ann. Intern. Med. 114: 257-63.

Reves JG, Glass PSA and Lubarsky DA (1994). Nonbarbiturate intravenous anesthetics. In: Anesthesia 4^th ed. Miller RD (Ed). Churchill Livingstone, New York, pp 228-272.

Schierhout G and Roberts I (2000). Hyperventilation therapy for acute traumatic brain injury. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2: CD000566.

Stockley IH (1999). Drug Interactions: a source book of adverse interactions, their mechanisms, clinical importance and management, 5^th ed. Pharmaceutical Press, London.

Tshibangu D (2010). Maslinic acid: A potential anti-sickle cell anaemia drug.  Paper presented at: 3rd Meeting of the African Network for Drugs and Diagnostics Innovation 11-13 October 2010, United Nations Office in Nairobi UNON, Nairobi, Kenya.

Wesongah JO (2008). Development and validation of a chloramphenicol enzyme linked immunosorbent assay method for the determination and monitoring of chloramphenicol residues in livestock products [PhD Thesis]. University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya.

Winhoven SM, Coulson IH and Bottomley WW (2004). Brachioradial pruritus: response to treatment with gabapentin. Br. J. Dermatol. doi 10.1111/j.0007-0963.2004.05889.x

World Health Organization (2008). Guidelines for programmatic management of drug-resistant tuberculosis. WHO/HTM/TB/2008.402. Geneva, World Health Organization.

B: REVIEWS AND OPINION PAPERS

The review article should be structured as follows: Background, Aim of review, Methods, Discussion and conclusion. 

• The review article should not be more than 3000 words
• Abstract: 300 words; Structured as above.
• The background section should include:
  • The background to the issue(s) presented, reviewed or discussed – similar or related reviews and/or opinion papers should be cited and referenced.
  • Problem statement,
  • Significance: why such a review or discussion is relevant and important

C: CLINICAL CASE REPORTS

For a clinical case study to be published, it should qualify as a new discovery in the clinical use of medicines or medical devices, or it should contribute to existing knowledge in the relevant field. It should be important in the area of research and rigorous methodology should be employed. It should have a structured abstract of not more than 200 words, structured as: Background, methods, results and conclusion. The main article should also be structured the same way, and should not be more than 2000 words. Tables and figures as well as pictures should be limited to only 2, which illustrate the main point.

ADDITIONAL GUIDELINES

The manuscript may, if necessary, be edited for length, grammatical correctness, and journal style.

Tables

Type each table with double-spacing on a separate page.

Number tables consecutively in the order of their first citation in the text and supply a brief title for each.

Do not use internal horizontal or vertical lines.

Give each column a short or an abbreviated heading.

Authors should place explanatory matter in footnotes, not in the heading. Explain all nonstandard abbreviations in footnotes. Use symbols to guide the reader.

Identify and include statistical measures of variations, such as standard deviation and standard error of the mean.

Be sure that each table is cited in the text.

If you use data from another published or unpublished source, obtain permission and acknowledge that source fully.

Additional tables containing backup data too extensive to publish in the main may be included separately as supplementary information. An appropriate statement shall be added to the text to inform readers that this additional information is available and where it is located. Submit such tables for consideration with the paper so that they will be available to the peer reviewers.

Illustrations (Figures)

Figures should be professionally drawn and photographed and submitted in electronic/soft copy (for example, JPEG or GIF) that will produce high-quality images in the Web version of the journal. Authors should review the images of such files on a computer screen before submitting them to be sure they meet their own quality standards.

Letters, numbers, and symbols on figures should therefore be clear and consistent throughout, and large enough to remain legible when the figure is reduced for publication.

Figures should be made as self-explanatory as possible.

Titles and detailed explanations belong in the legends--not on the illustrations themselves.

Photomicrographs should have internal scale markers. Symbols, arrows, or letters used in photomicrographs should contrast with the background.

Photographs of potentially identifiable people must be accompanied by written permission to use the photograph.

Figures should be numbered consecutively according to the order in which they have been cited in the text. If a figure has been published previously, acknowledge the original source and submit written permission from the copyright holder to reproduce the figure. Permission is required irrespective of authorship or publisher except for documents in the public domain. Where necessary, authors must include a credit line at the end of the figure caption.

Color illustrations will appear in the online papers but the publisher retains the right to reproduce them in gray scale in print versions of the journal.

Legends for Illustrations (Figures)

Type the legends for illustrations using double spacing below the corresponding illustrations.

When symbols, arrows, numbers, or letters are used to identify parts of the illustrations, identify and explain each one clearly in the legend. Explain the internal scale and identify the method of staining in photomicrographs.

Units of Measurement

Authors should report laboratory information in International System of Units (SI). The journal may request that authors to add alternative or non-SI units.

Measurements of length, height, weight, and volume should be reported in metric units (meter, kilogram, or liter) or their decimal multiples.

Temperatures should be in degrees Celsius.

Blood pressures should be in millimeters of mercury.

Drug concentrations may be reported in either SI or mass units, but the alternative should be provided in parentheses where appropriate.