Submission to acceptance process

Submission and peer-review

To submit an article:

  • Please ensure that you have prepared your manuscript in line with the SAMJ requirements.
  • All submissions should be submitted via Editorial Manager
  • The following are required for your submission to be complete:
    • Anonymous manuscript (unless otherwise stated)
    • Manuscript
    • Any supplementary files: figures, datasets, patient consent form, permissions for published images, etc.
  • Once the submission has been successfully processed on Editorial Manager, it will undergo a technical check by the Editorial Office before it will be assigned to an editor who will handle the review process. If the author guidelines have not been appropriately followed, the manuscript may be sent back to the author for correcting.

 

Peer-review process

Production process

Please note that there is a 6-month waiting time for publication, once an article has been sent to the production team.

The following process will follow:

  1. An accepted manuscript is passed to a Managing Editor to assign to a copyeditor (CE).
  2. The CE copyedits in Word, working on house style, format, spelling/grammar/punctuation, sense and consistency, and preparation for typesetting.
  3. If the CE has an author queries, he/she will contact the corresponding author and send them the copyedited Word doc, asking them to solve the queries by means of track changes or comment boxes.
  4. The authors are typically asked to respond within 1-3 days. Any comments/changes must be clearly indicated e.g. by means of track changes. Do not work in the original manuscript - work in the copyedited file sent to you and make your changes clear.
  5. The CE will finalise the article and then it will be typeset.
  6. Once typeset, the CE will send a PDF of the file to the authors to complete their final check, while simultaneously sending to the 2nd-eye proofreader.
  7. The authors are typically asked to complete their final check and sign-off within 1-2 days. No major additional changes can be accommodated at this point.
  8. The CE implements the authors’ and proofreader’s mark-ups, finalises the file, and prepares it for the upcoming issue.

Changing contact details or authorship

Please notify the Editorial Department of any contact detail changes, including email, to facilitate communication.

 

Publication

Online v. print

The SAMJ is an online journal. The online version of the journal is the one that has the widest circulation, is indexed by bibliographic databases including PubMed and SciELO, and is accessible in academic libraries. A printed edition , containing material selected by the Editor is also published each month and distributed to the membership of the South African Medical Association.

 

Online

  • The full text of all accepted articles is published in full online, open access.
  • Citation information of each article is based on its online publication.
  • You may want to make use of the advantages of online publication e.g. specify web links to other sources, images, data or even a short video.

Print

  • Not all articles will be selected for print.
  • An article may be selected for print in a different month from that in which it was published online.
  • Research articles will appear in abstract form only, if selected for a print edition.