Submissions

Author Guidelines

1. Who may submit a manuscript, when and how to submit

2. The Editorial Review and Acceptance Process

3. Authorship Criteria

4. How to Prepare your Manuscript

5. Ethics and Plagiarism policy including the use of Artificial Intelligence

6. Revisions

7. Manuscript submission, processing and publication charges

8. Types of Manuscripts and Limits

1. Manuscript submission is always open, year round.
The Editorial Board invites authors to submit their own original work relating to the humanities in Health Professions Education. Healthcare providers, caregivers, patients, lay-people – all are welcome to share their experiences. Please scroll down to the Types of Manuscripts and Limits section to see what kind of articles we are looking for.

All manuscripts are to be submitted on-line through the website after a free author registration. Registration allows authors to log into the author submission site with their user-name and password to submit and to keep track of their articles. Please contact the editorial office at rhime.meu@gmail.com in case of any difficulty.

2. The Editorial Review and Acceptance Process
Manuscripts will be reviewed for possible publication with the understanding that they are not being submitted simultaneously to any other journal, have not been published already, nor have been accepted for publication elsewhere. All manuscripts received will be duly acknowledged.

The Editors will review them initially; manuscripts that lack originality, have serious flaws, or fail to provide a significant message will be rejected at the editorial stage itself. The editor in charge of the manuscript will send it to two or more experts for review in a double-masked manner, without revealing the identity of the contributors to the reviewers, and vice-versa.

The contributors will be informed about the reviewers’ comments, and will be given an opportunity to respond to them. On average, the submission to first decision period is not more than 30 days. The editor, based on the comments of the reviewers on the revised manuscript, will take a final decision on acceptance or rejection of the manuscript.

Accepted articles will be copyedited (sometimes extensively) for structure, grammar, punctuation, style, and format. The editors reserve the right to modify manuscripts in order to ensure effective communication between the authors and the readers. In case extensive modification is required, the manuscript will be sent back to the author.

Page proofs will be sent to the corresponding author just before the publication of the article in the journal. These should be returned as soon as possible, preferably within three days.

3. Authorship Criteria
As recommended by the ICMJE, authorship should be based on ALL of the following four criteria:
Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
AND Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
AND Final approval of the version to be published;
AND Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work they have done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. Authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their coauthors.
Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged.

4. How to prepare your manuscript
The specific requirements of RHiME, based on the ICMJE-recommendations ["Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (ICMJE-Recommendations)” developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and updated in May 2022] are summarized below:

General Guidelines:
Double space the manuscript through out, except for tables which may be single-spaced
Number pages consecutively, starting with the first page
Use Times New Roman, Arial, or Liberation Sans font; size 12
Leave 25-mm margin on all four sides
Avoid abbreviations in the title. The full term for each abbreviation should be mentioned at its first use in the abstract or text; thereafter, use only the abbreviation.
Spell out numerals from one to ten; numerals at the beginning of the sentence should also be spelled out

Prepare the following THREE things BEFORE you start to upload

The masked article file, the title page, and a copyright form.

i) Masked article file:

• This should include the main text of the article. If the article requires these, then do also include references, legends of images and appendices (each starting on a separate page).
• Images, if any, should be uploaded separately, and should not be included in this file.
• Keywords: Include 3-8 keywords on a separate page at the end of the manuscript. They should preferably be MeSH terms recommended by the US National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) browser list. Visit http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/MBrowser.html to look for appropriate key words for your manuscript.
• RHiME has a policy of masked peer review; therefore, the main manuscript must not contain any mention of the authors' names or initials, the institution at which the study was conducted, or acknowledgments. Please also mask the references that pertain to you. Manuscripts that are not thus masked will be returned to the corresponding author.
• Disclosure that Artificial Intelligence was used or was not used (please see ethics section below for what details to include)
• Save the file as *.rtf, *.doc, or *.odt. Do not zip; limit the file size to 1 MB otherwise it may not upload.

ii) Title page: Include the following:

Type of article (for example: poem, narrative, etc)
Title of the manuscript: brief but informative
Full names of ALL contributing authors, including their academic degrees, their designation, the department and institution where they work/study, and their email ids.
Indicate the author to whom all correspondence about the manuscript is to be sent. Include corresponding author’s phone number
Sources of support, if any
Acknowledgments, if any: The source of financial grants, funding, authors’ industrial links and affiliations should be acknowledged. The contributions of colleagues and institutions should also be acknowledged.
Statement of conflict of interest: Authors must declare any financial support or relationship that may pose a conflict of interest. If there is none, this should be stated.

iii) Signed Contributors' form and Copyright Statement: (click on the link to access: Word Format; PDF format). Print, fill, sign and upload.

Other items that may be uploaded as supplementary files

i) Images:

• Each figure/illustration should be supplied as a separate file in JPEG or TIFF format.

• Figures should be numbered consecutively (Arabic numerals) according to the order in which they have been cited in the manuscript.

• Submitted images should be of good quality, high resolution (>100 dpi), and each not more than 2 MB in size, otherwise they may not upload.

• Do not zip the files.

• Images should be cropped to remove unnecessary areas.

• When graphs, scatter-grams or histograms are submitted, the numerical data on which they are based should also be supplied.

• If photographs of people are used, either the subjects must not be identifiable or their pictures must be accompanied by written permission to use the photograph. Please include the signed consent form for identifiable patients/participants (sample form: PDF, Word)

• Provide a brief, appropriate legend; include explanatory material, if required, in the legend (legends should be included at the end of the masked article file).

ii) Annexures: like participant consent forms, letters of permission, etc., where applicable

5. Ethics and plagiarism policy

Authors submitting their manuscripts to RHiME should ensure that the manuscript follows principles outlined by the Committee of Publication Ethics (publicationethics.org). Please also follow the guidelines as listed below:

i) Ethics Committee Approval: Many of the sections of the journal - like Poetry, History of Medicine, and personal Narratives - do not require Ethics Committee approval. However, if the authors plan to include patient/participant data, they must seek approval from a suitably constituted Ethics Committee of the Institution who will ensure that the work conforms to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki, 1995 (as revised in Tokyo, 2004). Do state, at the end of the manuscript, that approval was sought and granted. Give details of the name of the committee, the reference number and the date that the approval was granted. If unsure whether your study needs ethics approval/waiver, the best people to advise on the matter are on the ethics committee. Ask.

ii) Informed consent: Authors should also affirm that informed consent was taken from human subjects participating in research.

iii) Please ensure that the manuscript is an original work of the author. The journal does a plagiarism check and takes any issue of plagiarism very seriously. The editor may request the authors to provide a plagiarism certificate if it is deemed necessary.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in writing:
If they must use AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process, authors should use it only to improve the readability of the text, and to fix syntax and grammar issues.

Authors must NOT submit papers to RHiME where AI has been used to ‘generate’ the paper, the hypothesis, draw conclusions, or make recommendations, since AI could potentially produce biased and incorrect content. Authors must be the creators of the piece, and the custodians of ethics. They should take the final call (use human judgment) to decide whether to accept the suggestions made by AI or not, because, ultimately, the human author is accountable for the critical thinking involved and the scientific integrity of the content, and must take ethical responsibility for what they submit to RHiME. Indeed, for this reason, AI cannot be listed as author.

Finally, in the interests of transparency and integrity, authors should make a disclosure in the beginning of the masked article itself that they have used AI and AI-assisted technologies in their work. The disclosure will be published alongside the final work, if it is accepted for publication. The disclosure must include the following information:
1. What AI technology was used (the name, its version number etc),
2. The precise purpose it was used for,
3. The extent of its use (could range from one section of the paper to the entire paper: please detail), and
4. How it was applied (what the input was, and how the output was analysed and used by the human author(s)).

The editor may ask for more information at any time during the article management stage, and even after publication. The journal considers the following to be unethical behavior and may reject an article based on it:
1. Using AI in an intentional and substantial way and not disclosing its use
2. Using AI to generate ideas, text or images and not disclosing it up-front.

Is there a cutoff percent of AI content that is acceptable, and therefore permissible in articles submitted to RHiME?
Different AI checkers are known to give different results; by and large, 0-20% of AI generated content is acceptable. A higher percentage will trigger an editorial review where author intent will be examined, especially if no disclosure was made by the authors. Although, usually, authors will be contacted so that they may justify their use of AI, some papers with high certainty of AI use and zero disclosure may be rejected at the editorial stage itself. The Editors will make an informed decision and will have the final word on the matter.

iv) Letters of permissions: from the copyright holder of any material (text/figures/illustrations etc) that the authors have reproduced in the manuscript; these must be uploaded as supplementary material.

v) Patient's right to privacy: avoid identifying information like patient's name, initials, or hospital number in the text or in illustrations/photographs etc. unless written informed consent has been given by the subject/guardian. Mask the patient's eyes if possible; if not, obtain written consent from the patient.

vi) Narratives that contain identifiable data should similarly be accompanied by a signed participant consent form. In order to deidentify patients/participants, omission of some data or making data less specific is permitted but changing the data is not acceptable.

All such written and signed consent should be submitted with the manuscript (Sample form: PDF, Word).

vii) The Contributors' form and Copyright Statement: (click on the link to access: Word Format; PDF format) has to be submitted in original with the signatures of all the contributors at the time of manuscript submission. It may be uploaded to the manuscript submission site, or emailed to rhime.meu@gmail.com as an image (after scanning).

6. Revisions While submitting a revised manuscript, authors must address each remark made by the referees. The referees' remarks along with the authors' point to point clarification should be inserted at the beginning in the revised file itself. In addition, the changes in the revised file should be marked by underlining the changed text, or using colored font.

7. Manuscript submission, processing and publication charges: None

8. Types of Manuscripts and Limits