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About Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research

Aims and scope | Open access | Article-processing charges | Indexing services | Publication and peer review process | Editorial policies | Citing articles in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research | Why publish your article in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research?

This page includes information about the aims and scope of Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research, editorial policies, open access and article-processing charges, the peer review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.

Aims & scope

Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research, a forum for exciting findings in the field of surgical research, is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that encompasses basic, translational, and clinical research in all surgery-related disciplines, with a particular focus on minimally invasive procedures.

ASIR promotes the exchange of ideas, concepts and findings in all aspects of surgery. The journal aims to open up new avenues for the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of surgical problems, and be a bridge between different surgical specialties. The journal considers articles from any area of surgery-related research, including, but not limited to:

  •  Surgical research
  •  Clinical studies
  •  Surgical techniques and procedures
  •  Bioengineering
  •  Emerging technologies
  •  Endoscopy
  •  Teaching and stimulation
  •  Minimally invasive surgery

Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research will especially focus on the ever growing field of Minimal Access Surgery including Single Incision Surgery (SILS), Natural Orifice Approaches (NOTES) and Robotics. The online appearance of Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research allows the immediate publication of accepted articles and the presentation of large amounts of data and supplemental information, including embedded video files as part of the article.

Open access

All articles published by Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

Authors of articles published in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research are the copyright holders of their articles and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1290/$2010/€1515 for each article accepted for publication. We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. Generally, if the submitting author's institution is a Member the cost of the article-processing charge is covered by the membership, and no further charge is payable. In the case of authors whose institutions are Supporter Members, however, a discounted article-processing charge is payable by the author. For further details, see our article-processing charge page. A limited number of waivers for article-processing charges are also available at the editors' discretion, and authors wishing to apply for these waivers should contact the editors.

Indexing services

All articles published in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research are included in PubMed, the most widely used biomedical bibliographic database service, which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Other bibliographic databases that index articles published in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research include:

  • Citebase
  • Google Scholar
  • Index Copernicus
  • OAIster
  • PubMed
  • PubMed Central
  • SCImago
  • Scirus
  • Scopus
  • SOCOLAR
  • Zetoc

The full text of all research articles is deposited in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and other digital archives including e-Depot (The Netherlands).

BioMed Central is working closely with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research will be available.

Publication and peer review process

Content overview

Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research considers the following types of articles:

  • Research: comprehensive reports of data from original research, that reveal novel concepts of general importance and interest to the scientific community, with conclusions that deliver a substantial advance in the understanding of an important surgical problem. The work should not only be of exceptional significance within its field but also of interest to researchers outside the immediate area. The journal encourages 'advanced clinical investigations' which are research articles of the highest quality with focus on surgery related topics.
  • Review: articles describing new developments of interdisciplinary significance and highlighting unresolved questions and future directions; it provides a critical but balanced view of the field. Reviews should focus on one topical aspect of a field rather than providing a comprehensive literature survey, they can be controversial but should indicate opposing viewpoints. They have an educational aim and are 2000-3000 words.
  • Hypothesis: ideas or critics of ideas with discussion that will deliver a substantial advance in the understanding of an important problem.
  • Case report: reports of clinical cases that can be educational, describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma, suggest an association, or present an important adverse reaction. All case report articles should be accompanied by written and signed consent to publish the information from the patients or their guardians.
  • Methodology: short, single accounts of novel scientific work that describes innovative techniques of data collection or analysis. They provide a mechanism for publishing scholarly material where developing a full research article is unnecessary or inappropriate.
  • Letter to the Editor: they can take three forms: a substantial re-analysis of a previously published article, or a substantial response to such a re-analysis from the authors of the original publication, or an article that may not cover 'standard research' but that may be relevant to readers.

Peer-review policy

Manuscripts which fall within the scope of Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research, will be assigned to at least two expert reviewers. The reviewers will have up to three weeks to review the submitted article and the comments are sent to the authors without delay.

Peer reviewers will have four possible options for each manuscript:

  • accept without revision
  • accept after revisions
  • neither accept nor reject until the author(s) make revisions and resubmit
  • reject because the work presented is scientifically unsound.

Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research allows two revisions of an article.

Edited by Stanley Ashley, Seigo Kitano and Ronald Matteotti, ASIR is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research, a personalized section of the site.

Reprints

High-quality, bound reprints can be purchased for all articles published. Please see our reprints website for further information about ordering reprints.

Supplements

Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research will consider supplements based on proceedings (full articles or meeting abstracts), reviews or research. All articles submitted for publication in supplements are subject to peer review. Published supplements are fully searchable and freely accessible online and can also be produced in print. All full length articles (proceedings, reviews or research articles) are indexed by PubMed. PubMed displays the title of the supplement only in the case of meeting abstract collections. For further information, please contact us.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Citing articles in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research

Articles in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. Ann Surg Innov Res [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Ann Surg Innov Res 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research?

High visibility

Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.

Speed of publication

Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles are published with their final citation immediately upon acceptance in a provisional PDF form. The article will subsequently be published in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

Online publication in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other papers).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Authors of articles published in Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BioMed Central, please click here.