Focus and Scope

Journal of Surgical Dermatology (JSD) is focused on publishing up-to-date and clinically-relevant information on all dermatological procedures. The Journal aims to play a significant role in reporting cases involving reconstructive and cosmetic skin surgeries, as well as skin cancers. Moreover, reports on scientifically novel topics will be published periodically. All submitted original research articles, reviews, perspectives and case reports will be peer-reviewed and if accepted, will be published as Open Access articles. 

Some key words for JSD include, but are not limited to:

• Ambulatory phlebectomy
• Blepharoplasty
• Body contouring
• Botulinum toxin injections
• Chemical peelings
• Cryosurgery
• Dermabrasion and microdermabrasion
• Dermoscopy
• Dressing
• Excisional surgeries
• Fat injections
• Flaps
• Hair transplantation
• Iontophoresis
• Laser surgeries
• Liposuctions
• Mechanical resurfacing
• Mesotherapy
• Microneedeling technology
• Micropigmentation
• Mohs micrographic surgery
• Nail surgery
• Phlebology
• Photodynamic therapy
• Platelet rich plasma therapy
• Sclerotherapy
• Skin cancers
• Skin grafts
• Soft tissue augmentation
• Subcision and acne scar surgery
• Ultrasound therapy
• Ultraviolet therapy 

Section Policies

Editorials

Editorials provide an opinion on a specific topic related to surgical dermatology. It is a short and concise article which will not be peer-reviewed. A maximum of 10 references are allowed in an Editorial. Editorials are generally invited articles, but if you wish to write and Editorial, kindly contact the Editorial Office.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Research Highlights

Research Highlights is written by the Editorial Office of JSD for introducing valuable articles published in this journal.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Researcher in Spotlight

Researcher in Spotlight is written by the Editorial Office of JSD for introducing researchers who has published valuable articles in this journal.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Original Research Articles

Original Research Articles are the primary mode of scientific communication, it includes all reports of original research in dermatology. ORAs are peer-reviewed and should clearly state methodology, results and discussion. 

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Reviews

Reviews describe new developments, summarizes, progress or collects, published evidence for analysis. It is crucial that Reviews contain all the references used to perform the study and write the manuscript.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Case Reports

Case reports are detailed reports of the symptoms, signs, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of one (1), two (2), or up to three (3) clinical cases. Case reports are peer-reviewed and must provide appropriate clinical images or figures of the cases being reported.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Perspectives

Perspectives provide the author's view on dermatology related topics based on personal experience and ideas fueled from performed procedures or surgeries. Perspectives should contain all appropriate references and clinical images (especially if author is describing specific procedures).

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Short Communications

Short communications report a brief and concise study. Short communications must not have more than 30 references as a guideline.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Correspondences

Correspondences may be Letters to the editor or Responses from the authors, etc. They are not peer-reviewed and should not contain more than 10 references.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Peer Review Process

All manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Surgical Dermatology undergo rigorous peer review.

• The initial submission made by the author is reviewed by in-house editors to ensure its adherence to the editorial policies of JSD.
• The Editor-in-Chief (EIC) determines if the topic of the manuscript is within the scope of JSD. For more details of JSD’s aim and scope, click here.
•  On the advice of the EIC, The Managing Editor selects and assigns reviewers to the manuscript.
• After the evaluations by the reviewers have been received, the EIC makes one of the following recommendations: Accept manuscript, Accept manuscript with minor revisions, Major revisions required or Reject manuscript.
• If the decision is minor revisions, the authors have 15 days to resubmit the revised manuscript.
• If the decision is major revisions, the authors have 30 days to resubmit the revised manuscript.
• Upon resubmission, the EIC makes the final decision on whether the manuscript can proceed for production. In cases where a major revision was needed, the manuscript will be first sent to the initially assigned reviewers again for their evaluation and reassessment, before the EIC makes the final decision.
• Authors may appeal for a rejected submission. Appeal requests must be made in writing to jsd@piscomed.com with detailed reasons for the appeal and point by point responses to the reviewers’ remarks. Decisions on appeals are final.

 

 

Publication Frequency

The Journal of Surgical Dermatology is a bi-annual journal and will be published twice a year. 

Open Access Policy

The Journal of Surgical Dermatology is a Gold Open Access journal, and provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Editorial Policies

The journal will not accept a manuscript that has been published or is under consideration for publication in any other journal. The author needs to notify the journal if the data presented in the manuscript has been ever presented in conferences or other similar forums. The author will need to fill up the submission checklist to ensure that these criteria are fulfilled.

Publishing Ethics

PiscoMed Publishing requests all members involved in the journal publishing process to adhere the “Code of Conduct for Editors” and “Core Practices for Publishers” as stipulated by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). 

The publisher strictly adheres to the guidelines and best practices as followed:

• the recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals from the International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE)
• the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing developed by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

The publisher journal editors take all possible misconducts seriously, and adopt a zero-tolerance policy concerning any academic misconducts and ethical violations in research and publication. The violations include plagiarism, falsification of research, data fabrication, submitting manuscripts of others as one’s own, duplicate Submission at the same time and breached intellectual property rights, etc. The concerns or complaints on the possible allegations submitted to the journal (jsd@piscomed.com) will be dealt with promptly and appropriately according to the procedure set out in the COPE flowchart on complaints. If the allegation is supported by evidence, the submitted manuscript in question will be declined for consideration in the journal and all authors will be informed in this regard. A retraction initiated by authors or by the journal is required to take place if the paper has already been published, and the retraction will be made public. Authors of the work in question will receive the panel’s Decision via email and all appeals regarding the decision will have to be made to the publisher at jsd@piscomed.com within 30 days of the decision date.

Statement of Informed Consent

Clients have a right to their privacy, and it should not be violated without informed consent. Authors should protect their clients’ right to privacy by requesting oral or written consent from the clients or client’s guardian to publish his/her data, including photographs, prior to publication. Other details such as the race, ethnicity, religion or cultural background of a subject under study should be mentioned only when it is believed to have an impact on course of the disease and/or treatment discussed in the study. If changing the biographical details and/or identifying characteristics is done in order to protect anonymity, authors should provide assurance that the changes do not falsify the scientific meaning of a manuscript/report. The informed consent form/agreement should be included in as a supplementary document of a manuscript during submission.

Human and Animal Rights Statement

Humans: When the submitted manuscript involves experiments performed on human subjects, including healthy volunteers, authors should adhere to the Declaration of Helsinki principles of 1975, as revised in 2000 and 2008 and indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the author's Institutional Review Board or Research Ethics Committee. Any possible adverse consequences of the work for ecosystems, populations or individual organisms must be weighed against the possible gains in knowledge and its practical applications.

Animals: When reporting experiments involving animals, authors should abide by relevant international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals. For studies involving client-owned animals, author(s) must declare that they have obtained the oral or written informed client consent during submitting and adhere to a high standard (best practice) of veterinary care.

Conflict of Interest

The Journal of Surgical Dermatology functions on a double-blind peer review system to avoid conflicts and potential bias. The author(s) should hold responsibility for declaring any conflicts of interest with respect to their work. The author(s) must provide details of any relationship with financial bodies or funding agencies that might influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All authors, members, reviewers and editors must disclose any association that poses a conflict of interest in connection with the manuscript. The corresponding author must download and complete the ICMJE Conflict of Interest Form on behalf of all the authors regarding to potential conflicts of interest, and submit the form as a supplementary document during the article submission process.

For authors:

While submitting, authors must list all competing interests relevant to this work, including but not limited to:

• Funding sources
• The role of sponsors in the work design, data collection, and results of the analysis.
• Whether the author is serving on the editorial board of this journal submitting to.

 

For editors and reviewers:

Editors and reviewers must declare any possible conflict of interests in connection with the manuscript, and if necessary, they must avoid the peer review process. When Editorial Board Members publish articles in the served journal, the editorial office will actively emphasize it so that the authors know that they recuse the potential peer review process.

Common reasons for editors and reviewers to be replaced include but are not limited to:

• The editor or reviewer works at the same organization as one of the authors.
• The editor or reviewer is one of the authors of this work.
• The editor or reviewer is on the avoidance list from the author(s).
• The editor or reviewer has a financial relationship or personal relationship with an author.

Authorship

Authorship

Authorship identification means obtaining assurances that each author of the manuscript's group of authors has contributed to the research, in a certain part of it. The editorial board requires the group of authors to distribute the contribution to the conduct of research and preparation of the manuscript, with a separate emphasis on the contribution of the author in respect of whom doubts arose. All authors should hold the responsibility of fairly evaluating their respective roles and their co-authors’ roles in the project. A co-author is expected to have contributed to some component of the work which led to the paper, or be involved in interpretation of its results. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or general supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship, but may be acknowledged for their contribution as appropriate to the publication in Acknowledgements.

Changes to Authorshp

The authors should carefully check the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript. Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript is accepted for publication. If there is a need, justified on the part of the authors, to remove or add co-authors, or to change the order of authors, such changes after the submission of the manuscript are possible only with the proof of written confirmation from all authors (including the existing authors, author(s) to be added and/or removed).

In the event of situations not described above and probably not foreseen in advance, in terms of the reality of authorship in this manuscript, the editors take actions based on the recommendations of COPE, in particular "How to recognise potential authorship problems".

Language

All articles should be written in English—either British or American as long as consistency is observed. Authors whose first language is not English may want to have their manuscripts professionally edited before the final submission to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by its prospective readers.

Units of Measurement

Units of measurement should be presented using only System International (SI) units.

Erratum & Withdrawal Policy

Erratum

All publisher-introduced changes are highlighted to the author at the proof stage and any errors are ideally identified by the author and corrected by the publisher before final publication. In case of any errors in published articles discovered by readers, authors, editors, etc., please contact the journal editor.

It should be noted that errors made by editors are called erratum, and errors made by authors are called corrigendum. However, erratum and corrigendum have no influence on the research logic and the correctness of the results.

PiscoMed Publishing will only instigate an erratum or corrigendum to a published article after receiving approval and instructions from the editor.

Withdrawal

If authors change their mind and decide not to pursue publication of papers with the journal, they must write a letter addressed to our editors at jsd@piscomed.com, explaining the reason(s) of submission withdrawal. Consents of all co-authors must be obtained for author-initiated submission withdrawal. The decision to withdraw a submission would eventually rest with the editors, including the Editor-in-Chief.

It is relatively more difficult to withdraw a paper that has been processed for peer-review or is under peer-review compared to withdrawing a new submission because the editors and reviewers have expended much time and energy in editorial process and manuscript evaluation, respectively. To withdraw a paper that has been processed for peer-review, authors should clearly argue their case on scientific reasons; only valid and sound reasons will be accepted. He/she would be required to pay a penalty fee (USD 200). Authors are advised to keep in mind that an article should only be withdrawn if the authors detect significant error or flaws, as it is not an acceptable practice to withdraw an article after it has been sent for peer review. Once the approval of submission withdrawal is granted, the submission will be removed from the journal’s online submission system, and a confirmation email of submission withdrawal will be sent to the authors. The withdrawal process is considered to be complete once the author receives a confirmation of withdrawal from the Journal Editorial Office.

Submission withdrawal is also possible for accepted papers that have not been formally published, including the newly accepted papers and Articles in Press.

Withdrawal of accepted paper and article in press is usually editor-initiated. The reasons of withdrawing accepted papers and articles in press are similar to those of retracting a published article, i.e., academic misconducts and ethical violations in research and publication regardless of the severity of these issues. The misconducts and violations include plagiarism, falsification of research, data fabrication, submitting manuscripts of others as one’s own, submission of same manuscript to different publication venues at the same time and breached intellectual property rights. Once the suspected misconduct and ethical violation is brought to our attention, the editors will organize an investigation and authors are required to cooperate in the investigation; any accepted papers or articles in press subject to investigation at this stage will not be arranged for article production or finalization. A panel will be organized to investigate the allegations. If the allegations are proven true with supporting evidence, the accepted paper or article in press will be marked for withdrawal, and a notification email regarding the Panel’s Decision will be sent to all authors of the work. Any appeals regarding the Panel’s Decision will have to be made to the Publisher within 14 days of the decision date. In the absence of an appeal from the authors within the 14 days, the submission will be removed from the journal’s online submission system, and a confirmation email of submission withdrawal will be sent to the authors.

Authors should note that any amounts of paid Article Processing Charge will not be refunded if their accepted papers or Articles in Press are withdrawn on the grounds of academic misconducts and ethical violations in research and publication.

Misconduct Policy

Duplicate Submission

Manuscripts submitted to JSD should:

1) not have been published before;

2) not concurrently be submitted elsewhere.

If part of a manuscript has been published or will be published elsewhere, the authors must let the editors know in a cover letter. If duplicate submission is detected during peer review, the manuscript may be rejected. If it is detected after publication, the manuscript may be retracted.

Plagiarism Detection

The journal will strictly not accept manuscripts that are found to be plagiarized. The journal will verify the originality of the submitted manuscripts with iThenticate, the plagiarism detection software.

If a manuscript uses a text copied directly from another source, this text must be written in quotation marks and original source must be cited. If any kind of plagiarism is detected during the review process, the manuscript will be rejected.

Authors and researchers can also use iThenticate to screen their work before submission by visiting http://www.ithenticate.com.

Advertising Policy

All advertising policies are independent of editorial decisions. Advertisements must comply with local laws, and not be deceptive or misleading. For more inquiries, please send email to jsd@piscomed.com.

Disclaimer

This journal  is not liable to the statements, perspectives, and opinions contained in the published articles and advertisements.

This journal and the Publisher disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any ideas or products referred to in the articles or advertisements.

• For authors: Once submitting a manuscript, It means that you have be aware of all publishing policies & ethics,  and will strictly abide by them.
• For reviewers: Once accepting the request to become a reviewer, it means that you must be aware of the peer review policies, and proactively disclose of all potential conflicts of interest, and guarantee that an article will be judged fairly and objectively. 
• For publisher: This journal  is not liable to the statements, perspectives, and opinions contained in the published articles. The appearance of advertisements in the journal shall not be construed as a warranty, endorsement, or approval of the products or services advertised and/or the safety thereof. This journal and the Publisher disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any ideas or products referred to in the articles or advertisements.

Indexing and Archiving

 National Library Board

 Google Scholar

 CNKI Scholar 

 Portico

• All the articles published online will be archived by Portico for long-term digital preservation.
• Authors are encouraged to self-archive the final version of their published articles into institutional repositories (such as those listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories).
• Authors are also encouraged to use the final PDF version published on the website of PiscoMed Publishing Pte. Ltd.

Preprint Policy

Authors are permitted to post their non-peer-reviewed original research manuscripts to preprint servers before submitting to Journal of Surgical Dermatology. 

Authors are not allowed to post any versions of articles that have been revised as a result of peer review, accepted for publication or published in the journal on a preprint server. The manuscript whose corresponding preprint version has been indexed (e.g. in MEDLINE or PubMed) will not be considered.

We encourage formal citation of preprints in the reference list if appropriate.