Rules for authors of articles
The journal is issued quarterly. Articles sent by authors to the editorial office are reviewed by the Editorial Board and leading experts of the area.
Articles sending to the journal should correspond to the following rules.
General rules
1. Author(s) present(s) the following materials to the editorial office of the journal in electronic form:
– a cover letter signed by head of organization and stamped (in PDF format). The cover letter should contain: author’s (authors’) full name, position, academic title and academic degree, postal and e-mail addresses, and phone number of an author with whom the Editorial Board should correspond;
– a conclusion of a commission on the possibility of an article’s open publication with signatures of its chairman and members (in PDF format);
– a version of an article with signatures of all its authors and a date on its last page (in PDF format);
– an electronic version of an article. The article’s electronic version is a file containing the article’s text without hyphenation in Microsoft Word or RTF format. Illustrations should be presented separately in TIFF or JPEG format.
A file with an article should be called as surname of its first author with his initials without gaps and points (for example, IvanovAA).
Sending files by e-mail of the editorial office you should follow these rules:
– title of a letter’s subject should contain surname and initials of first author without dots and spaces, then the article’s type (review, original, conceptual, practical) is indicated through the underscore, then a date of sending manuscript in format hh.mm. yy is written through the underscore (for example, IvanovAA_review_01.01.21);
– use files attachments;
– if necessary, use well-known archivers.
2. Text formatting
Text of an article should be typed in Times New Roman font, 14 pt, the interval is one and a half.
Paragraph indent is 1.25 cm. Fields are 2 cm from each margin. Any action with the font such as underlining, italics, semi-bold, capital (title), tracking, etc. is forbidden. Text should be typed without hyphenation (hyphenation of words, both automatic and manual, is forbidden).
Text design of an article should correspond to the State Standard GOST 7.89-2005. Author’s and Publishing Text Originals. General Requirements.
Diagnoses of diseases and forms of behavior disorders should be correlated to the International Classification of Diseases and Disorders of Behavior (ICD-10).
Units of measurements should be given in accordance with GOST 8.471-2002. The Unity Measurements Ensuring State System. Units of Sizes.
The volume of review articles should not exceed 15 pages, experimental and general theoretical studies – 10 pages. This volume includes: article title, name(s) of organization(s), abstract, keywords, text, illustrations (photos, drawings), tables, and references.
Recommended number of illustrations is no more than four, number of tables is no more than three.
3. The article design scheme
The structure of original articles should correspond to format IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion).
a) Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), article title, author’s (authors’) surname(s) and initials, name(s) of institution(s) (without abbreviations), address, postal code, city, country.
Article title
– the title should be informative;
– for the conciseness of the title description, it is recommended to use the main key concepts (words) of the publication topic;
– it is recommended to use no more than 13–15 words in the title (including conjunctions);
– it is forbidden to use abbreviations, except for international abbreviations (EU, USA, OPEC, etc.);
– it is allowed to use only generally accepted abbreviations.
These rules apply to author’s abstracts (annotations) and keywords.
Surnames of articles’ authors should be presented in one of the accepted international transliteration systems and should not be changed in all author’s publications.
When transliterating, it is recommended to use the BSI standard (British Standard Institute, UK). To do this, you can use the online service for transliteration of bibliographic descriptions of scientific publications http://transliteration.pro or a link http://ru.translit. ru/?account=bsi.
b) Abstract provides understanding of article’s basic provisions. Its length is not less than 250–300 words. The recommended volume of a structured abstract is at least 250–300 words (for original article), while a non-structured one is 150–200 words (for scientific review). Abstract is designed in accordance with GOST 7.9-95 Paper and Abstract. General Requirements.
The abstract design scheme is:
– introduction containing relevance, aim and tasks of a work, objects of a study, methods used in a work (if they are new or their description is necessary for understanding of essence and features of article contents);
– results (main theoretical and experimental results of a work);
– discussion of results;
– summary or conclusion.
In the text of an abstract, you should use significant words from the article’s text, use syntactic constructions that are characteristic of the language of scientific and technical documents, and avoid complex grammatical constructions (for example, “the author of the article considers…”).
The text should be coherent with the use of the words “consequently”, “moreover”, “for example”, “as a result”, etc., or disparate statements presented should logically follow from one another.
c) Keywords clearly reflect the article’s content, and allow find necessary publication in catalogs or electronic databases. Keywords should be correlated to the list of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) developed by employees of the United States National Library of Medicine.
It is recommended to use 3–7 words or short phrases, the main one of which is indicated at the beginning. If the lists don’t contain any suitable designations of new terms, it is necessary to pick up the closest from available ones.
d) Introduction provides a brief overview of the relevant data, a critical assessment of the literature relevant to the problem under consideration, and a justification for the novelty and significance of the study in global terms (not only in terms of a given city or country).
The unresolved issues are identified, the relevance of the research is justified, the aim and tasks are formulated, explaining the further research, and the scope of application. Introduction describes the existing conflicts in theory, methodology, practice or conclusions of studies, ʻwhite spotsʼ in studies or scientific schools, the perspective of the topic development. The author’s position and motivation for creating the article are presented. Each keyword of the article should be reflected in the introduction.
It is recommended to avoid long analyses and long historical excursions.
As a motivation, an author is expected to:
– develop a new methodology;
– use new experimental data;
– fill the gaps in science and practice;
– modernize of a methodology (theory), or optimize something.
e) Materials and methods. This section describes the sequence of a study, provides a rationale for selecting groups for observations or experiments and selecting methods that ensure the reliability and reasonableness of the results obtained, and briefly presents information about statistical methods. For experimental studies, a detailed description of the experiment, methods and equipment, and the objects of research that were used are given.
The section should contain: where and when a study was conducted; criteria for including patients in follow-up groups and exclusion criteria; a description of the study method (cohort, prospective, randomized drug trial, retrospective, series of observations); a detailed description of a new drug, method, modification, experiment, surgical intervention in the certain sequence; a brief description of the protocol (Standard Operating Protocol — SOP).
It is recommended to follow the Unified Standards for Reporting Results and tests of the CONSORT Expert Group (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials), which can be found at the link http://www. consort-statement.org/
Methods published earlier should be accompanied by references: the author describes only the changes related to the topic.
It is mandatory to indicate compliance with ethical principles, both local and international (European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals; Helsinki Declaration; patient’s informed consent).
e) Results. Here should be revealed the article’s innovation, which provides its motivation.
The main requirements for this section are clarity and consistency of presentation, compliance with the stated aim and tasks of the article, a complete overview of all the results, which should be clear and concise and describe the conclusion, idea, concept or method that the author came to as a result of the study. The data obtained should be presented in absolute numbers and as a percentage, and the 95 % confidence interval (95 CI %) and the p value should be indicated. Error bars are required at all points of the experimental and calculated data, with an explanation in the text of how these errors were established.
Compact statement of an article is promoted by representation of studies’ materials in the form of tables or illustrations in logical sequence. You should be limited to those illustrations (tables) which explain main arguments of your article and evaluate the degree of their validity. Data of tables and figures should not be repeated (only a table or a figure).
f) Discussion. With this section, the author confirms that the aim has been achieved, and the results are new and applicable in science and practice.
The results are analyzed and explained, and their place in the structure of knowledge known to mankind is determined.
The emphasis is placed on new and important aspects of a study. Discussion is carried out by correlation of author’s own observations with other studies in the studied discipline.
The section describes:
– with what facts (methods) the author agrees, and with what he disagrees; at the same time, the disagreement must be confirmed by the conclusions of their methodology, compare the facts (methods) with each other, provide a description of the same, similar, different;
– what limitations did the study or the whole scientific field face or could face; – what are the prospects for developing studies on this topic;
– comparison of different methods (if necessary);
– comparison of the study results with the results obtained in similar studies.
Discussion of the results includes summarizing and evaluating the study results. It is necessary to compare the results obtained in the article with the results of studies by other authors, after considering other scientific concepts, determine which of them can be used to explain the results, reflect the assessment of the reliability of the results obtained and their comparison with other researchers’ existing results. That is, it is necessary to determine the place of the results obtained in the course of the study in the structure of knowledge known to mankind.
Discussion can include reasonable recommendations for clinical practice and possible use of the received results in forthcoming studies.
The Discussion section should be about the same size as the previous Results section.
g) Сonclusion (Summary). The main task of conclusions is systematization.
The results that were explained in the discussion are presented in a brief and systematic form and are a concise description of the main part of the article, which indicates the practical and scientific value of the study, possible areas of application.
The most widely used format for this section is as follows: start with a few sentences summarizing the work done, and then present the main conclusions in a list.
h) The design of the bibliographic part of the work includes the use of citations and references, as well as a bibliographic description of the sources.
Citation
Citation of other researchers is given for a number of reasons:
– to justify the study motivation and writing of the article;
– it is necessary to make it clear that the study is of an international theoretical and applied nature;
– in order to enable other researchers to better understand the arguments and the author’s point of view.
Quotations are literally reproduced phrases or sentences of another author, related in meaning to the content of the text in which they are inserted.
According to the rules of the Russian language quotations are marked with quotation marks. A single quote can contain only one passage of the work.
References
References should contain publications of the last 5–10 years and basic ones on the theme. In original articles, it is recommended to cite no more than 10–15 sources, in reviews – 20–30 sources, including articles from publications reviewed in Scopus and WoS (at least 30 %). Sources are listed in the order in which they were mentioned in the article. Author is responsible for correctness of bibliographic data.
List of Russian-language literature is made out as a bibliographic index in accordance with GOST 7.0.5-2008 Bibliographic Link. General Requirements and Rules of Figure up.
Since 2021, the journal has been using the style of citation of Russian-language articles according to the NLM – National Library of Medicine standard. Detailed instructions are available on the website http://www.nlm.nih.gov/citingmedicine.
4. Requirements to figures:
– the format of a file is TIFF, any program supporting this format (Adobe PhotoShop, CorelDRAW, etc.), charts is made in Excel or Word with data storage;
– each figure should be submitted as a separate file in the TIFF format, with not less than 300 dpi. resolution;
– figure’s width is no more than 100 mm, figure’s height is no more than 150 mm, figure’s legend has to be easily readable, a font is not less than 8 pt.
Figures are sent by separate files. When transfer it is forbidden to place figures in Word files.
Figures should be accurate, photos should be contrast. Figure captions are given on a single sheet with the indication of the figure’s number, with an explanation of value of all curves, letters, figures and other symbols. It is necessary to specify extent of increase in captions to photomicrographs.
Abbreviations are not allowed in figure captions.
A square in the left field of the article’s text indicates a place to put a figure. The figure’s number is designated inside of the square.
Electronic files of figures should allow reproduce high quality images in the electronic version of the journal. If a figure has already been published, the original source should be indicated.
People in photos should not be recognizable, or an author has to present a written permission for publication of images to the editorial office.
5. Requirements to tables.
Tables should be evident, they should have a name and sequence number, headings should correspond to contents of the columns precisely. Abbreviations are not allowed in table names.
It has to be made a reference in an article to each table. All explanations, including interpretation of abbreviations are given in footnotes.
You should specify the statistical methods used for representation of variability of the data and reliability of distinctions.
6. Transliteration and translation.
For the purpose of studying articles by readers who do not know Russian, at the end of each article there is information about its authors, institutions, transliterated original title of article, translated title of article, extended abstract and keywords, transliterated list of cited literature. To translate individual words (phrases), you can use automated translation (https://translate. google.ru/).
7. Information about the author(s).
List of data on the author(s). Surname, name, academic degree, academic status, name of place of work/study without reductions even if it is standard for any country, postal address (house number, street, zip code, city, country); author’s e-mail. It is necessary to use the official name from the institution’s charter, otherwise the affiliation with the institution in the international databases may be complicated.
Checking for compliance with the design requirements. The Editorial Board evaluates a received article for its compliance with the requirements for articles submitted for publication.
Checking the observance of copyright and related rights. The Editorial Board with the help of software checks an article for its compliance with copyright and related rights, the presence of borrowings.
Articles containing less than 80 % of the original text are returned to its authors for revision within 2 working days from a date of check for the presence of borrowings.
As a rule, an article is published in the journal when it has not less than 80 % of original text. In exceptional cases taking into account the nature of information’s borrowing made by an author from various sources, existence of references to them, the Editorial Board in co-ordination with the journal’s Editor-in-Chief or his deputy can make a positive decision on publication of an article with less than 80 % of originality.
Reviewing. To determine the scientific and methodological level of an article, its examination, a ʻdouble-blindʼ review, is carried out (a reviewer does not know who an author of an article is and in which institution an article was prepared, an author does not know who a reviewer is).
The term of reviewing (examination) of an article as a rule, should not exceed 21 days from a date of its receipt to the editorial office.
The journal reviews all materials submitted to the editorial office that correspond to its subject matter for the purpose of their expert evaluation. All reviewers are qualified specialists in the subject of peer-reviewed materials and have had publications on the subject of the reviewed article within the last 3 years. Reviews are kept in the editorial office of the publication for 5 years.
The editorial board of the journal sends the authors of the submitted materials copies of reviews or a reasoned refusal.
The editorial board of the publication must send copies of reviews to the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation upon receipt of a corresponding request to the editorial office of the publication.
An article sent to the journal should not be sent to any other periodicals and also should not be already published in any other journal.
Articles are published in the order of their receipt to the editorial office.
The Editorial Board reserves the right of reduction of articles without changing the conceptual basis of their content. Manuscripts are not returned to its authors.
The journal accepts requests for any information content to be placed on its pages (announcements and commercials).
Full text electronic versions of articles are submitted on the website of the Scientific Electronic Library www.elibrary.ru and the official website of the journal’s publisher.
References to the articles of the journal are represented in the Russian Science Citation Index.
Address of the editorial office: the journal Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, Federal Scientific Center of Rehabilitation of the Disabled named after G.A. Albrecht, 50 Bestuzhevskaya Street, 195067 St. Petersburg, Russian Federation.