Any research that collects data from animal or human samples or involves working with copyrighted materials (such as review manuscripts) MUST be approved by a valid Ethics committee and MUST include the “ethics code” and the approving agency address on the “Title Page” when submitting the manuscript. The JRRS will check the code; if the code was not retrieved, the manuscript will be fast-rejected. The submission fee will be un-refundable in these cases. 

As JRRS also reviews engineering and non-medical manuscripts, these manuscripts do not need an ethics code unless they test their proposed apparatus or procedure on a human being or animal.

For any study conducted inside Iran, the code MUST be retrievable in the National Ethics Platform. Ethics codes from agencies outside Iran are not acceptable for studies undertaken inside Iran unless they have also received approval from the National Ethics Platform.

All types of clinical trials MUST be registered in a valid clinical trial registry and provide the registration code and the registering agency address in the "Title Page" when submitting the manuscript. JRRS will check the code; if the code was not retrieved, the manuscript will be fast-rejected.  The submission fee will be unrefundable in these cases. 

Valid registration agencies are any national agency approved by WHO for registering clinical trials. Details are available on the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP). In Iran, IRCT is a formal registry for clinical trials; however, registration in any other registry worldwide is acceptable.

Note: Providing ethics codes does not eliminate the need to provide a “clinical trial registration code”. The only exception is when the authors registered their trial in a valid registry, and the registry announced their study or the clinical trial scope. In these cases, these documents MUST be provided when submitting the manuscript.

To view the forms and checklists required for manuscript submission, you must first register here on the journal website and then enter your account from here. Forms and checklists, as well as the downloadable form of the authors' guide, are not accessible to visitors without a user page or those who have not entered their user space.

1. Missing ethics code (and IRCT code for clinical trials) on the title page.

2. Missing or incorrect ORCID of one or more authors.

3. Inclusion of a person in the list of authors who does not fit the authorship criteria.

4. Acknowledging a person without their providing their written consent.

5. Provide a non-academic email for the corresponding author.

6. Failure to set the title page in both Farsi and English according to the title page example available on the JRRS website.

7. Missing submission documents. 

8. Failure to complete all requested information in forms and checklists, or absence of a signature.

9. Failure to send the receipt of the online payment of the submission fee, or to provide the receipt of the transactions through the Shaba number or card-to-card transfer.

10. Failure to comply with the authors' guide.

11. Poor writing in terms of Persian grammar and scientific and academic standards in the manuscript.

12. The presence of the name or any indication of the author(s) in the text of the manuscript. 

13. If more than 10% of the references are books, conference abstracts, websites, etc.

14. If more than 80% of the references are older than 5 years. 

15. If less than 10% of the original references in a narrative review belong to the authors’ team.

16. Any contact with the journal office during the judging period. 

17. Any ethical violation in the process of data collection, preparation, and submission of the manuscript, even if discovered after the publication of the article.

You can see the timeline for manuscript review for fast and regular track process here