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Guidelines for Editors

These Guidelines for Editors ("Editor Guidelines") are subject to, and incorporated into, the PoolText Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and other policies incorporated by reference (the "Terms"). All terms in these Editor Guidelines shall have the same meanings as those defined in the Terms.

How to participate in PoolText

This page describes the process for adding a journal to PoolText and explains what is required of participating journals. A journal must qualify on the Scientific quality of the publication.

If you received an e-mail inviting you to join PoolText, it is highly likely that you already meet the minimum requirements to join and move on to Step 3 of the evaluation process (described below) after you submit your application (Step 1)

Before You Apply

Please check PoolText Scope and Pre - Application Requirements to understand whether your journal is qualified for participating PoolText. Please note that PoolText, in its sole discretion, may approve or decline any application for membership at any time, and may allow or deny access to the PoolText Platform to any person or journal at any time.

Journals that already are indexed for Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index – Expanded, MEDLINE, Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), EBSCO, EMBASE, and SCOPUS usually does not require further review to join PoolText.

PoolText Scope

We consider the following factors in determining if a journal is in scope for PoolText:

  • The journal must be peer-reviewed and have a clearly stated peer review policy.
  • The journal must publish in medical and health sciences.
  • The primary content of the journal should consist of one or more of the following article types:
    • Original research and review articles
    • Clinical case reports
    • Descriptions of clinical or surgical procedures
  • The affiliations of the editors and authors should reflect the journal’s scope and demonstrate editorial independence and diversity.
  • The journal must be responsible for the peer review process and editorial processes underlying the published articles.

PoolText looks for compliance with guidelines and recommendations published by professional organizations, including Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf) from ICMJE and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (joint statement by COPE, DOAJ, WAME, and OASPA; http://doaj.org/bestpractice), and the NISO Recommended Practices for the Presentation and Identification of E-Journals (PIE-J; https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/pie-j)

Pre - Application Requirements

The following requirements must be met before making any kind of application to PoolText:

  1. The journal should be publishing scientific content in the field of medicine and health science.
  2. The journal must have a properly registered ISSN. This means that there must be a confirmed record for the journal in the official Register of the ISSN International Centre.
  3. The journal must be in the scope for PoolText, as described in the PoolText Scope section above.
  4. A minimum of 5 peer-reviewed articles (e.g., original research or review articles, clinical case reports) and one issue must be published before you apply.
  5. Journal must have a valid and active website including journal’s policies, appropriate number of editorial board members including full names and affiliations, a clear and understandable statement of publication fee policy, guidelines for authors section, publication schedule, and a contact page.
  6. Databases and directories in which your journal is indexed should be stated on the website accurately.
  7. The journal should conform to scientific publication rules and international ethical principles.
  8. The journal should assign or willing to assign DOI for each published article.

Who is authorized to apply and manage the PoolText account?

Founder Editor, Editor-in-Chief, Managing Editor, Editors & Associate Editors are considered authorized to apply and manage the PoolText account for the journal.

Note: PoolText will confirm whether the applicant has the authority to manage the PoolText account of the journal if necessary.

The Membership Process

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Step 1:

Membership Request

If your journal meets the Pre-Application Requirements above and you are authorized to manage an account on behalf of your journal, you may apply via the Journal Account Request Page.

Start Application Process

We strongly recommend you to register with an email address that exists on your journal website. This will accelerate the submission verification process.

If you have further questions regarding the PoolText application process please contact us via contact@pooltext.com.

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Step 2:

Initial Application Screening

PoolText screens the applications for a number of factors, including for accuracy and to ensure that the journal meets the Pre-Application Requirements noted above. PoolText also determines if the journal is in the scope for PoolText during this initial application screening. PoolText may communicate with the journal in case of any inconsistencies or missing information.

For journals that meet the requirements for the initial application screening, the process continues to step 3 (Scientific Quality Review)

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Step 3:

Scientific Quality Review

After the initial assessment, PoolText will review and assess the journal for the scientific and editorial quality. Our priority is to make sure that PoolText is useful and reliable both for editors and authors. In this respect, we try to review all membership applications to PoolText in detail, and sometimes it may take a while to complete the review process.

Any account request will be rejected immediately without notice if PoolText believes or suspects the journal is a fake/imitation/predator journal.

After reviewing the journal information, policies, and content, PoolText will inform the journal whether the journal meets our scientific and editorial quality criteria given below.

Scientific and Editorial Quality Criteria (SEQC)
  • Articles published in your journal must not have been published anywhere else simultaneously.
  • Registered ISSN must be valid and correct.
  • Databases and directories in which your journal is indexed should be stated on the website accurately.
  • The title of your journal must not be the same as the title of an existing journal or must not be similar to mislead the authors.
  • The editors of the journal must have a scientific background of the subject of your journal's scope.
  • Your journal must not be stated as being indexed in fake/improper indexes to mislead the authors.
  • Your journal should not have suspicious situations and features mentioned below:
    • Despite being a newly founded journal, publishing fee is unacceptably high
    • Promising very rapid peer-review processing and publishing
    • Publishing in irrelevant scientific fields at the same time (e.g. medicine & history)
    • Some published articles are not accessible
    • Blank volume(s)/issue(s) (less than 2 articles were published in that volume/issue)
    • Having imprecise or inconsistent document format of published articles in the journal.
    • Repeated articles (the same article was published in different volume/issue)
    • Despite being a newly founded journal, journal states that prestigious indexes (e.g. PubMed, SCI, EMBASE, EBSCO, Scopus) are being processed.
    • Not having a publisher
    • Not having an email address or having an inactive email address for contacting.
    • Not having a physical contact address
    • Misleading journal contact info (e.g. the address provided on website is not compatible with the address provided by IP/WHOIS)
    • Articles were assigned improper DOI numbers or DOI numbers assigned by the relevant journal provided by common repositories (e.g. zenodo, figshare)
    • Attempt to show the impact factor obtained from any other source than Clarivate Analytics as "Journal Impact Factor" in order to mislead the authors
    • No or insufficient "Instruction for Authors" section
    • Editorial board members have no email addresses
    • No aim and scope section
    • Anyone of the editorial board members has not published an article in the relevant journal
    • Editorial board members have insufficient background in the scientific field of the relevant journal
    • Institutional info and the academic degrees of the editorial board members have not been specified on the website of the journal.
    • Showing some websites which are known by the authors but not a journal index indeed, in the index list of the journal (e.g. COPE, ICMJE)
    • In order to keep the index list of the journal crowded, showing the indices of which name or reputation is unknown.
    • Not using any manuscript submission system
    • Contact email address is an email address with public domain (e.g. gmail, yahoo)
    • Self-attribution on website, such as leader, best, high citation, etc. (despite being a newly founded journal)
    • Same or similar web address or webpage as an existing journal
    • Presence of images, figures, etc. that do not comply with scientific publishing on the website

PoolText evaluates each journal according to SEQC and may provide feedback to the journal to make the necessary changes if the SEQC is not met with an acceptable range.

Note: We may also contact with the members of editorial board of the journal to make sure that the stated editors are the members of editorial board of the relevant Journal.

For the journals meeting SEQC, the process continues to step 4.

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Step 4:

Completion of Account Type and Journal Information

PoolText in its sole discretion may approve or decline your application. If PoolText approves your application, after the evaluation phase is complete:

  • We will ask you to complete a Registration Form online with PoolText, available at www.pooltext.com.
  • Upon completion of the application, and pursuant to the Terms, PoolText will provide you with access to the PoolText public site.
  • At this stage or later you will be able to choose your account type and services.

After you complete the journal information in your account you will have access to the system and you will be able to see the articles uploaded to PoolText.

All the information you will enter should be current and accurate.

Lifetime Monitoring

Ongoing participants in PoolText must continue to meet PoolText’s quality standards and to comply with scientific publication rules and international ethical principles. PoolText, in its sole discretion, may allow or deny access to the PoolText Platform to anyone or any journal.

Principles of the System Usage

The rules you are required to follow while using the system are explained in the Terms, including these principles listed below.

  • Editors who act in an aggressive/looting manner improperly for the approval of articles shall be warned at first; if they continue acting in this manner, they shall be suspended from the system for a definite period in the beginning, and then for an indefinite period if this is repeated.
  • Editors should approve/invite the articles/authors only by using our system. Editors who by-pass our system by using any other communication ways (e.g. sending invitation emails to authors who uploaded articles to our system) will be warned or their journal account will be suspended if necessary.
  • Editors who share personal information of their own or others, wrong or deceptive information about their journal or another journal, and aggressive, sexually explicit, illegal and immoral content or content that may offend others in the "announcements to the authors" section of the system will be warned or their journal account will be suspended if necessary.
  • For editors who publish, reproduce or distribute an article listed in the system in part or in whole without the prior written consent of the authors, or share, make a reference to or sell them in printed or visual media organs or electronically, the journal of the relevant editor will be suspended from the system. All kinds of documents, data, and papers that may be used as evidence before the legal authorities shall be sent to the relevant author(s) upon request.
  • Unless the articles listed in the system are submitted to your journal officially - in other words, unless the articles are submitted using the "article submission system" of your journal - these articles may not be published or printed in your journal. .
  • Editors are responsible for updating their journal info (e.g. editorial time, indexes, fee). Editors who intentionally mislead authors about their journal info at our system will be warned or their journal account will be suspended if necessary.
  • If the journal no longer meets PoolText’s standards including SEQC, the editor of the relevant journal will kindly be asked to fix the issue(s) that we determined. In case the journal doesn’t respond to make the necessary changes within a reasonable time the journal account will be suspended.

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