About the Journal

Approach

Aquichan is a scientific journal from the Nursing and Rehabilitation Faculty, edited by Universidad de La Sabana. It is oriented to the promotion and encouragement of care in nursing developments.

Subject and scope

Aquican is a medical and health publication from the health science area, from the nursing discipline. It publishes articles that are the result of research addressing any of these topics: epistemology, health promotion, well-being and quality of life, confrontation and adaptation of health, technologies for health care, and care processes and practices.

The journal receives articles in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, which are products of investigations or revisions that are not under evaluation process in other scientific journals, either print or electronic. Approved articles in Spanish and Portuguese must be translated to English for publication.

The translation process would be the authors’ responsibility, who must use the certified translators suggested by the journal. Authors may propose equally certified experts. The Universidad de La Sabana scientific journal department will support the process.

Article Types

  1. Research article: new research findings reports or conceptual analysis that represent significant contributions to the nursing discipline. The structure must include an introduction, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusions, according to the guide stablished by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, available at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/manuscript-preparation/preparing-for-submission.html#three
  2. Review article: Reports that are the product of the critical analysis of the scientific literature. They present a synthesis of research results with the purpose of facilitating the comprehension of the studied phenomenon and providing information about the scientific evidence related to the topic. In this category, systemic and metanalysis revisions and meta-synthesis, integrative revisions, and scoping reviews are included.

Aquichan does not accept case studies, editorials, or letters to the editor.

Peer Evaluation Process

1. Editorial Committee

All articles are revised by the internal editorial board, which verifies the observance of the criteria in the Authors Guidelines, as well as the thematic and methodological pertinence. If the article does not comply with any of the guidelines, the author(s) will be informed of the modification needed or the decision to decline it.

2. Peer Reviewers

Once the editorial board has completed its process, articles are submitted to a double-anonymized peer review by researchers active and external to the institution, national and international, who will evaluate the academic, scientific, and innovative quality of the manuscripts.

Peers have fourteen calendar days for the revision. The concept may be approved, approved with changes (optional – mandatory), approved, but the peer will verify the corrections, or rejected.

3. Editor’s Decision

The editor studies the recommendations of the editorial board and the reviewers’ concepts to decide whether to publish or reject the manuscripts.

4. Response to the Authors

Aquichan will inform the authors within ninety calendar days if their manuscripts were accepted or rejected for publication. Authors will be informed, within fifteen to thirty calendar days, if they must do adjustments concerning either the thematic pertinence or the scientific or methodological relevance, as well as regarding the presentation guidelines established by the journal. When manuscripts follow these aspects, the peer review process will begin.

Regarding the peer-review process’ times, two external reviewers will be assigned to do the evaluation. They will confirm their availability for the process within three calendar days; if the answer is positive, the concept will be received between fifteen and thirty calendar days.

According to the decision of each of the peers, authors will be informed about the coming process; if the manuscript was approved with changes, authors have at most seven calendar days to respond—the editor will verify the adjustments. When the concept is approved, but the peer will verify the corrections, authors have at most seven calendar days—the adjusted manuscript will be sent to the peer, who will have at most five calendar days to verify the corrections and give a definitive concept. When both peers reject the manuscript, the authors will be informed about the decision.

Editing Process

  1. Proofreading: According to the Vancouver Norms, all manuscripts are subject to an orthotypography and style revision. The proofreader will do the revision in three calendar days and send the document to the author, who will have two calendar days to revise it, answer the comments, and send it approved.
  2. Final PDF Approval: Once the layout process is finalized (put the text in the journal’s template), the PDF will be sent to the author, a pre-final version of the article. The author has two calendar days to approve this version. The terms of the revision are images, tables, graphics, content distribution, etcetera.

Ethics Declaration and Good Conduct

Ethical Norms: Aquichan follows the guidelines “Responsible Research Publication: International Standards for Editors,” adopted in the Second World Conference on Research Integrity-Singapur, July 22 to 24, 2010. The text was also published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

The journal requests the guarantee of the ethics committee that approved the research.

The submissions of fragmented articles from the same research will be rejected. This practice is known as salami slicing: https://publicationethics.org/search?t=salami+slicing

Errata Sheet

In the case of rectifications about the information supplied by the authors, these will be done in the number following the announcement and will be the author’s responsibility; Aquichan, as the channel of publication, will be the publisher of the errata sheet.

In the case of improvements or orthographic mistakes, visual management of the information, or involuntary imprecisions, the author(s) can contact the journal via email to ask for the adjustments to the electronic version, which will be done as soon as possible.

If the journal, in any stage of the editorial process, finds falsification, data omission, article duplication, or plagiarism, will return the original manuscript to the author with a notification to the sponsor, research center, or university. Each of the articles submitted to the journal will be verified with internal procedures to avoid plagiarism and article duplication (a duplicated article is one that does not represent 75 % of originality regarding another document published by the author(s) in a different journal).

Indexing and Visibility

Biblat (base de datos PERIÓDICA)
Biblioteca Virtual en Salud Enfermería Colombia (BVS  Enfermería Colombia)
Cuiden index
Dialnet
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Fuente Académica Premier (EBSCO)
Google Académico
HINARI (Reasearch4Life)
Latindex
Lilacs
MIAR
Publindex (C)
Red ALyC
REDIB (Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico)
SciELO
Scimago Journal Ranking (Q4)
Scopus
Ulrich

Ethics Declaration and Good Conduct

  • Aquichan follows the norms stablished by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
  • The journal requests the guarantee of the ethics committee that approved the research.
  • The submissions of fragmented articles from the same research will be rejected.

Authors

  • All authors are publicly responsible for the document’s content.
  • When submitting an article to Aquichan, authors assume they have read and accepted the “norms for authors.”
  • By policy of the Ethics Committee for Publications, prestigious authors must refrain from giving their names to support manuscripts the have not participated.

Peers

  • They must refrain from giving a concept when there is a conflict of interest (personal or academic) and inform the editor about it.
  • They must maintain the manuscripts’ confidentiality.
  • They will neither copy nor retain the delivered manuscript.
  • Reviewers must not use data, arguments, or interpretations without the authorization of the authors.
  • They must give precise, objective, nice, and justifiable concepts.
  • If they suspect any inappropriate behavior or plagiarism, they must confidentially write to the editor.

Editor

  • Refrain from publishing articles when he/she is faced with conflicts of personal interest and controversial loyalty that may influence or partialize the quality of the scientific nature and the journal’s prestige.
  • Keep strict confidentiality of all the received documents.
  • The decision of accepting or rejecting a manuscript for publication must be supported in relevance, originality, and pertinence to the journal’s field of study.
  • Do not exclude studies with negative results.
  • When he/she detects a serious mistake in a published document, he/she must assume responsibility and correct it soon and notoriously.
  • When he/she suspects inappropriate conduct from the authors, he/she must inform the authors, before contacting the directors of the institutions of their affiliation.

Conflict of interests

Conflict of interest arises when authors, reviewers, or editors have interests that inappropriately affect the results of the research and its publication. The interests may be personal, financial, politic, and academic.

Considering this:

  • The authors and reviewers will inform the editors about the conflict of interest that may arise.
  • The editors will let the readers know of any conflict of interest that arises.

Inappropriate Conduct

Inappropriate conduct is having the intention of making believe something that is not true to the readers. Because of this, the editor, the editorial board, and the peers must reject the documents that may incur inappropriate conduct.

Plagiarism

Every source must be referenced. When the author cites long texts from a written or illustrated source, he/she must ask for authorization and show prove of it.

The identification of plagiarism in a manuscript is a motive for Aquichan to reject it. In that case, the authors will be informed of the reason for the manuscript’s rejection, clearly presenting the plagiarism evidence.

Environmental Considerations

The author(s) must explicitly mention the environmental consideration within the article.

Reproduction Rights

This journal and its contents are the property of Universidad de La Sabana. Any use, reproduction, transformation, public communication, or distribution with lucrative intentions requires previous authorization by Universidad de La Sabana.

The names and emails presented to Aquichan are only used for the means declared by the journal and are not available for any other purpose.

The articles presented in this journal represent the opinion of their authors and do not constitute the official opinion of Universidad de La Sabana.

Aquichan does not charge for the submission or processing of the articles; it is a non-profit journal.

Human and Animal Rights Policies

All research sent must be within an appropriate ethic frame. If there are suspicions that the study is not within it, the editor may reject the manuscript or contact the ethics committee of the author. On exceptional occasions, if the editor has ethical concerns about a study, the manuscript may be rejected for ethical reasons, even if it was approved by and ethics committee.

If the research is with humans, human material, or human data, it must have been done in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration and approved by and appropriate ethics committee. The studies need to be supported and approved by a bioethics or ethics committee.

If the authors report the use of a new procedure or tool in a clinical context, for example, a technical advance or a case report, they must declare in the manuscript why this new procedure or tool is more appropriate than the current clinical practices and the need for a clinical patient. The justification is not required if the procedure has already been approved for clinical use in the authors’ institution. Authors are expected to have the approval of an ethics committee and the patient's consent for the novel use of the procedure or tool. There must be a clear clinical advantage, based on the clinical need, that was not evident before the treatment.

Support Documents and Informed Consent

Authors must include, as secondary documents, the support letter from the institution’s ethics committee and the informed consent forms when needed as required in the authors’ guidelines.

Not complying with this requirement will result in the rejection of the manuscript.

Contents Permanence

CrossMark Politics

The Crossref initiative is identified with the brand icon:

This initiative guarantees the reader the version he/she is accessing is the latest version of the CrossMark logo in the publication. He/she will have to click on it to access the records. There, he/she will find the information concerning significant or major changes in the published document’s versions. Additionally, it is linked to the DOI of Aquichan’s publications, which guarantees the stability and permanence of the updates in time.

In this journal, we upload the PDFs in two instances:

  1. When the editorial process is complete and approved by the author and the editorial team.
  2. When the last modifications to that PDF are made, the result of a print-thought revision.

Placing the CrossMark icon compromises and makes the journal responsible for announcing and keeping updated anyone about any change on the article.

What type of changes and updates are part of the CrossMark version report?

  • Addendum: secondary documents that give additional information about what has been published. It presents additional results. An explanation and access to that content will be given.
  • Corrections: New versions with minimal changes that do not affect the sense of the text, concerning orthotipography errors and others along the same line. There will be a notification for updates concerning these modifications.
  • Duplicates: If we discover documents previously published in another media or a document is published again because of a technical mistake or operation accident, there will be a clarification about what happened, and the necessary documents will be modified and updated in the CrossMark versions.
  • Errata (erratum): Articles in which, after the digital or physical publication, errors are reported, critical concerning the sense of the writing, images, tables, graphics, bibliographical references, etcetera. The errata will be mentioned and corrected in the new version.
  • Rectification (corrigendum): Cases in which the author of the published article reports an erratum. The rectification and the correction will be mentioned.
  • Elimination: A petition of the part implicated with the legal authority to request it. All content and available documents will be deleted. Only the referencing information will be available along with an explanation on the article’s page and in the different media to access the content.
  • Retraction: At the request of the implicated part with legal authority, a text announcing the retraction and, in the cases it occurs, a note from the part implicated will be placed in all of the media that gives access to the article. On the article’s page, the stipulated texts and a note will be maintained. The title will change to “Retraction: <Article Title>,” the PDF will be kept with a watermark on all pages the retraction was declared. The same will be done with the versions of the available reading formats of the journal (HTML, XML, ePub, etcetera). For the COPE policies used by the journal, click here.