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TNAOI Journal of Otorhinolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery
(Official Publication of the Tamil Nadu Association of Otorhinolaryngologists of India)

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Author Guidelines

Authors should not submit the same manuscript in the same language simultaneously to more than one journal. The rationale for this standard is the potential for disagreement when two (or more) journals claim the right to publish a manuscript that has been submitted simultaneously to more than one journal, and the possibility that two or more journals will unknowingly and unnecessarily undertake the work of peer review, edit the same manuscript, and publish the same research paper.
Preparing or manipulating of data and results, intellectual property theft, and plagiarism are highly unacceptable, as it is beyond the ethics of an author. Information obtained from various media can be provided in the manuscript only with prior permission from the owner of the source of information or data.
Authors and coauthors are requested to review and ensure the accuracy and validity of all the results prior to submission. Any potential conflict of interest should be informed to the editor well in advance.
All authors are requested to submit the Author Declaration Form while submitting the manuscript and the Licence to Publish Agreement without failure once they receive the acceptance of their research paper for publication.
Sharing with public media, government agencies, or manufacturers the scientific information described in a paper or a letter to the editor that has been accepted but not yet published violates the policy of our journals.
Authors should declare that all work in their submitted paper is original, and cite content from other sources appropriately to avoid plagiarism.
Authors must ensure their contribution does not contain any defamatory matter or infringe any copyright or other intellectual property rights or any other rights of any third party.
Authors should ensure that their manuscript as submitted is not under consideration (or accepted for publication) elsewhere. Where sections of the manuscript overlap with published or submitted content, this should be acknowledged and cited. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work. Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should declare any potential conflicts of interest relating to a specific research paper. Authors should inform the editor or publisher if there is a significant error in their published piece, and work with the editor to publish an erratum, addendum, or retraction where necessary.

In accordance with the position statement of the Committee on Publication Ethics, the TNAOI Journal of Otorhinolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery policy with regard to artificial intelligence (AI) tools and large language models such as ChatGPT is as follows:

An AI tool cannot be listed as an author of a paper as they are not legal entities
Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements, or collection and analysis of data must disclose this use in the Methods or Acknowledgments section of the paper
This disclosure must transparently and specifically state how the AI tool was used, which tool was used, and which sections of the paper are affected. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscripts, even the parts produced by an AI tool, and are therefore liable for any breach of publication ethics and for any inaccuracies

Before submitting a manuscript, an author is requested to read the policies and guidelines Sidebar section of the journal website. The author has the right to complaint and ask for the explanation if he perceives any misconduct in any applicable policies and ethical guidelines.

This Journal is an open access journal and does not charge readers or their institutions for access to the journal articles. The open access supports the rights of users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles provided they are properly acknowledged and cited. There is no article processing fee charged to the authors and all articles are immediately available on the journal website once published. Permitted reuse is defined by the following user license: Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) The authors retain the copyright in addition to the scholarly usage rights and the TNAOI Journal of Otorhinolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery receives the publication and distribution rights.

All the published articles are rigorously double-blind peer-reviewed and screened with plagiarism detection tools (Turnitin); content match of less than 20% is considered acceptable. Reviews are delivered promptly. Accepted papers are published in approximately three to six months from submission.

To connect authors to their contributions and prevent fake research in scholarly publishing, The journal encourages authors to update their personal data and assign ORCID number to their profiles. This makes publishing more transparent and trustworthy.

Correction, Retraction, and Removal of Articles

Correction. The journal will publish a correction if the scholarly record is seriously affected (e.g., if accuracy/intended meaning, scientific reproducibility, author reputation, or journal reputation is judged to be compromised. Corrections that do not affect the contribution in a material way or significantly alter the reader's understanding of the contribution, such as misspellings or grammatical errors, will not be published. When a correction is published, it will link to and from the work. The correction will be added to the original work so that readers will receive the original work and the correction. All corrections will be as concise as possible.

Retraction. The journal reserves the right to retract items. Retractions will occur if the editors and editorial board finds that the main conclusion of the work is undermined or if subsequent information about the work comes to light of which the authors or the editors were not aware at the time of publication. Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, inaccurate claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data will also result in retraction of the work.

Removal. Some circumstances may necessitate removal of a work from the journal. This will occur when the article is judged by the editors and editorial board to be defamatory, if it infringes on legal rights, or if there is a reasonable expectation that it will be subject to a court order. The bibliographic information about the work will be retained online, but the work will no longer be available in the journal website. A note will be added to indicate that the item was removed for legal reasons.

Name Change Policy

The journal is committed to supporting requests for author name changes and/or pronoun changes, with as few barriers as possible. Name changes and/or pronoun changes are available to authors upon request, with no legal documentation required. Upon receiving a name change request, the journal will update all metadata, published content, and associated records under our control to reflect the requested name change. Authors who wish to update or change their name should contact “secretary@tnaoijournal.com”. Requests will be treated with respect and confidentiality, and addressed as quickly as possible.

Manuscript Preparation Guidelines

Article Structure
Use line numbering throughout your paper.

Please ensure your submission meets the recommended word limits. A short, concise article is more likely to attract readers. In general, a research article should contain:

Figures: 6-8
Tables: 1-3
References: 25 – 50

Additional figures and tables may be added to Supplementary Material.

Papers should be well structured; they must comprise:
- Title
- Short title of no more than 80 characters
- Author name(s), full email addresses for each author. Please indicate who the corresponding author is.
- Abstract: No more than 200 words briefly specifying the aims of the work, the main results obtained, and the conclusions drawn. Citations must not be included in the Abstract.
- Keywords: Up to 6 keywords (in alphabetical order) which will enable subsequent abstracting or information retrieval systems to locate the paper.

- Main text: For clarity this should be subdivided into:
i. Introduction: Describing the background of the work and its aims.
ii. Methods: A brief description of the methods/techniques used (the principles of these methods should not be described if readers can be directed to easily accessible references or standard texts).
iii. Results and Discussion: A clear presentation of experimental results obtained, highlighting any trends or points of interest. (Results and discussion can be separate sections, if needed).
Conclusions: A brief explanation of the significance and implications of the work reported.
iv. References: These should be to accessible sources. Please ensure that all work cited in the text is included in the reference list, and that the dates and authors given in the text match those in the reference list. References must always be given in sufficient detail for the reader to locate the work cited. Please note that your paper is at risk of rejection if a disproportionate share of the references cited are your own.
- Supplementary Material: Appendices and other Supplementary Material are permitted, and will be published online only.
- Data: We encourage authors to make the dataset on which their paper is based available to access. Authors may upload all data related to the results reported in the manuscript as supplementary materials with the submission, or provided via a URL to a public repository. Data should be presented in a format that facilitates readability and reuse.
Where restrictions apply, submissions should be accompanied by a statement of the conditions of access and permitted reuse of the data.
For Review Papers the organisation of the paper can be different. It is however important that a review is more than a summary of the literature; an in-depth critical discussion is essential for acceptance of a review paper.

Nomenclature and Units
All terminology and notation used will be widely understood. Abbreviations and acronyms should be spelled out in full at their first occurrence in the text.

SI units are strongly recommended. If non-SI units must be used, SI equivalents (or conversion factors) must also be given. Please use the spellings 'litre' and 'metre' (a 'meter' is a measuring instrument).

Artwork. Figures should appear in numerical order, be described in the body of the text and be positioned close to where they are first cited. Each figure should have a caption which describes the illustration, and that can be understood independently of the main text. The caption should be given in the text, and not on the figure itself.

Tables
Tables should be inserted at the end of the manuscript. Tables must be provided in an editable format e.g., Word, Excel. Tables provided as jpeg/tiff files will not be accepted.

Language
Papers must be in good, grammatically correct English. If your paper cannot be understood, it will be rejected before peer review. If English is not your native language, please seek the assistance of a colleague or professional translator.

References
Citations in text:
- Use surname of author and year of publication: Jones (2002) . Insert initials only if there are two different authors with the same surname and same year of publication.
- Two or more years in parentheses following an author's name are cited in ascending order of year, and two or more references published in the same year by the same author are differentiated by letters a, b, c, etc. For example: Brown (1999, 2002, 2003a, b).
- Different references cited together should be in date order, for example: (Smith 1959; Thomson & Jones 2008; Green 2015).
- If a paper has been accepted for publication but has not been published the term "(in press)" should be used instead of a date.
- If a paper has been submitted but not definitely accepted the term "(submitted)" should be used. If the paper is still being prepared the term "(in preparation)" should be used.
- The abbreviation "et al." should be used in the text when there are more than two co-authors of a cited paper.

If you decide to use online referencing software, then you can use the Harvard referencing option.
Please double-check: every citation in the text must match up to an entry in the reference list and vice-versa.

Reference Links
We use digital object identifiers (DOIs) to link references to the source material. This can only be done if the data provided in the references are correct. Please be very careful, especially when copying references, to ensure that surnames, journal/book titles, publication year and pagination are all correct. Please include DOIs where available.

List of References
References should be listed alphabetically at the end of the paper. Although "et al." is preferable in the text, in the list of references all authors should be given.

Reference styles

Journal articles

Author, A., Author, B., Author, C., et al. (2019). The title of the paper. Jour. Tit. 2(2), 121–127.

Conference Paper

Author, A., Author, B., Author, C., et al. (2008). The title of the conference paper. Proc. Int. Conf. Systems, City Name, Country, May 2008, pp. 121–127.

Book, book chapter and manual

Author., A. and Author, B. (2004). The title of the book chapter, in Editor Name, A. (Ed.): The Title of the Book, pp. 121–127. Cambridge, MA: XYZ Press.

Author A., Author B., and Author, C. (2005). The Title of the Book. Cambridge, MA: XYZ Press.

Websites

Article title, , accessed 27 November 2014.

Thesis

Author, A. (2005). The title of the thesis. PhD thesis, XYZ University.

References in languages other than English
These should be accompanied by an English translation of the article title:

Identifying products
When mentioning a drug, product, hardware, or software program in a manuscript, it is important to provide detailed information about the product in parentheses. This should include the name of the product, the producer of the product, and the city and country of the company. For example, if mentioning a Discovery St PET/CT scanner produced by General Electric in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, the information should be presented in the following format: "Discovery St PET/CT scanner (General Electric, Milwaukee, WI, USA)." Providing this information helps to ensure that the product is properly identified and credited.

Supplementary Materials
Supplementary materials, including audio files, videos, datasets, and additional documents (e.g., appendices, additional figures, tables), are intended to complement the main text of the manuscript. These supplementary materials should be submitted as a separate section after the references list. Concise descriptions of each supplementary material should be included to explain their relevance to the manuscript. Page numbers are not required for supplementary materials.

Author Contributions
Please identify each author’s contribution(s) to the submission, using the guidelines of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy Project (CRediT), should be provided. Categories include Conceptualization; Methodology; Software; Validation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Resources; Data Curation; Writing - Original Draft; Writing - Review & Editing; Visualization; Supervision; Project administration; Funding acquisition; Other. See the CRediT website for more details.

The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the descriptions are accurate and agreed by all authors.

Acknowledgments

Include individuals or companies which have assisted with your study, including advisors, administrative support and suppliers who may have donated or given materials used in the study. If there are no acknowledgments, then still include this section and insert: “The authors have no acknowledgments to report.”

Funding

Include all funding sources for the study. If there is no funding involved, then still include this section and insert: “The authors have no funding to report.”

Conflict of Interest

All affiliations or financial involvement (e.g., employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants, patents received or pending, royalties) with any organization or entity with a financial interest in, or in financial competition with, the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript must be completely disclosed in the submitted manuscript.

All financial and material support for the research and work must be clearly identified in the manuscript including listing of support that might constitute or give the appearance of influencing the findings. Please report all support for the work reported in your manuscript without time limit. For all other items, the time frame for disclosure is the past 36 months.

All authors are expected to provide disclosures to the corresponding author before submission for inclusion in the “Conflict of Interest” statement. Items included in the disclosure statement should cover: consulting fees or paid advisory boards (for the past three years or the known future), equity ownership/stock options (publicly or privately traded firms, excluding mutual funds), lecture fees when speaking at the invitation of a commercial sponsor (for the past three years or the known future), employment by the commercial entity that sponsored the study, grant support from industry, patents and/or royalties, expert witness, and other activities performed for a commercial sponsor.

Additionally, authors who are Editorial board members of the journal must include this information in the Conflict of Interest section using the following format: “[AUTHOR] is an Editorial Board Member of this journal but was not involved in the peer-review process of this article nor had access to any information regarding its peer-review."

If there is no conflict of interest to declare, include the statement "The authors have no conflict of interest to report."

Data availability statement

Authors must provide a data availability statement in their article that details whether data are available and, if so, where they can be found.

Choose one of the following five options:

· The data that support the findings of this study are openly available.

· The data that support the findings of this study will be openly available following a delay.

· The data that support the findings of this study are available upon request from the authors.

· Any data that support the findings of this study are included within the article.

· No new data were created or analysed in this study.

Citing data

Any data assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) by a data repository should be cited in an article’s reference list. Data citations should include the following minimum information: author(s), title, publisher (repository name), DOI.

Diversity & Inclusivity (use of inclusive language)

Incorporating inclusive language in manuscripts recognizes the array of differences among individuals, demonstrates respect for all individuals, displays sensitivity to varying perspectives, and fosters equal prospects.

Articles should steer clear of any insinuation of one person's superiority over another based-on factors like age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability, or health status. Utilizing inclusive language consistently throughout is of paramount importance. Authors must ensure their writing is void of partiality, clichés, slang, and allusions that assume a dominant culture or cultural presumptions.

To attain gender neutrality, it's recommended Authors employ plural nouns ("clinicians, patients/clients") as the default whenever feasible, rather than resorting to gender-specific pronouns ("he," "she," or "he/she"). Descriptors tied to personal characteristics like age, gender, cultural backgrounds, culture, sexual orientation, disability, or health status should only be included if they hold relevance and validity.

Authors are requested to read and follow the ICMJE guidelines for preparing a manuscript for submission to a medical journal

https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/manuscript-preparation/preparing-for-submission.html

Human Trials

Regarding research papers involving human subjects, the Journal's policy mandates that authors adhere to specific criteria. The guidelines adhere to the 1978 Helsinki Declaration. This research on human subjects should have received approval from the author's institutional board or another suitable committee; the name and date of this approval committee must be acknowledged.

In a similar vein, the manuscript ought to comprise a declaration that affirms the following:

"All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008."

and

"Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study." If such consent is not obtained, an appropriate justification must be provided. If the journal so requests, authors are obligated to provide the institutional board's approval letter.

Animals Studies and Ethical Treatment

There are guidelines established by the National Research Council regarding the use and caring of laboratory animals. Any research conducted on these animals must adhere to the boundaries set forth by these guidelines. Every pertinent aspect concerning the utilization of these animals for investigations and other associated research ought to be explicitly delineated in the manuscript.

The author must obtain written approval from the institutional ethical committee (for animal/human studies), which should be submitted to the journal upon request. A comparable declaration ought to be included in the methods/experimental section of the manuscript.

For example:

“All animal studies were done after receiving approval from Institutional Ethical committee approval with approval number …..”

Please mention the approval number with date.

Article Types

Research Article

Research Articles report on primary research. They must describe significant and original observations. Consideration for publication is based on the article’s originality, novelty, and scientific soundness, and the appropriateness of its analysis.
Research Articles are reports of original work. Authors are asked to follow the EQUATOR Network for Research Articles.
Prior approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or an Ethics Review Committee is required for all investigations involving human subjects.

Research Articles should not exceed 3,000 words, excluding up to 6 tables or figures and up to 40 references.

Review Article

Review Articles are considered reviews of research or summary articles. They are state-of-the-art papers covering a current topic by experts in the field. They should give evidence on and provide answers to a well-defined aspect or question in a particular area. Review Articles must include a critical discussion of the reported data and give a clear conclusion with potential impacts on the standard of care.

Review Articles should not exceed 3,500 words, excluding up to 6 tables or figures and up to 60 references.

Systematic Review

Systematic Reviews are literature reviews focused on a research question that synthesizes all high-quality research evidence relevant to that question. Systematic Reviews should be presented in the Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion format. The subject must be clearly defined. The objective of a Systematic Review should be to arrive at an evidence-based conclusion. The Methods section should give a clear indication of the literature search strategy, data extraction procedure, grading of evidence, and kind of analysis used. We strongly encourage authors to comply with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines.

Case Report

Case Reports can present a case study, case report, or other description of a case. Case Reports present significant new insights or cases with an unusual and noteworthy course. Submissions can be based on a case or a number of similar cases. The most important aspect of the presentation is that it should provide a new perspective on a recognized clinical scenario or may represent an entirely new clinical condition. The novelty of the case(s) may lie in the phenotype, the presentation, the investigation, and/or the management. We strongly encourage authors to comply with the CARE guidelines. The manuscript must include a statement detailing that written informed consent for publication was obtained and from whom (e.g. “Written informed consent was obtained from the patient for publication of this case report and any accompanying images.”). If the patient has died, consent for publication must be obtained from their next of kin. If the patient described in the case report is a minor or vulnerable, then consent for publication must be obtained from the parent/legal guardian. The completed consent form must be made available to the Editor if requested, and will be treated confidentially.

Book Review

Work consisting of critical analyses of books or other monographic works related to the scope of the journal. The review should provide a discussion on the theme and content of the book and should go beyond an uncritical summary of each chapter.

Editorial

Editorials provide a viewpoint on specific articles or on general subjects directly relevant to the journal. Editorials are written by an editor or other member of the journal.

Methods Article

Methods Articles describe methods or protocols used to perform an experiment or carry out a research plan. They should not report research results. Authors may submit a Study Protocol outlining a research and/or statistical analysis plan for proposed, or ongoing, but incomplete, research studies, including but not limited to, clinical trials, population-based studies, clinical outcome studies, and service evaluations. Only study protocols that have received ethical approval will be considered and, where expected by community convention, study protocols must be pre-registered and the trial/study registration number should be provided in the manuscript. Manuscripts reporting study protocols must adhere to the relevant reporting guidelines for their study design, such as the SPIRIT, PRISMA-P or other relevant reporting guidelines as detailed on the Equator Network website

Clinical trials

All clinical trials submitted to TNAOI Journal of Otorhinolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery must be entered in a publicly accessible registry approved by the WHO or ICMJE. See the list of approved registries.

Clinical trial reports must adhere to the relevant reporting guidelines for their study design, such as CONSORT for randomized controlled trials, TREND for non-randomized trials, and other specialized guidelines as appropriate.

Diagnostic studies

Reports of studies of diagnostic accuracy must adhere to the STARD requirements or alternative guidelines appropriate to the study design (see the EQUATOR web site) and include a completed checklist as supporting information. Authors must complete the appropriate reporting checklist not only with page references, but also with sufficient text excerpted from the manuscript to explain how they addressed all applicable items.

Observational studies

For observational studies, including case control, cohort, and cross-sectional studies, authors must adhere to the STROBE Statement or alternative guidelines appropriate to the study design (see the EQUATOR web site) and include a completed checklist as supporting information. Authors must complete the appropriate reporting checklist not only with page references, but also with sufficient text excerpted from the manuscript to explain how they addressed all applicable items.

For observational studies, authors are required to clearly specify (a) What specific hypotheses the researchers intended to test, and the analytical methods by which they planned to test them; (b) What analyses they actually performed; and (c) When reported analyses differ from those that were planned, authors must provide transparent explanations for differences that affect the reliability of the study's results.

Identifiers

As much as possible, please provide accession numbers or identifiers for all entities such as genes, proteins, mutants, diseases, etc., for which there is an entry in a public database, for example: