Perspectives in Legal Medicine and Medical Expertise (PERSPECTIVES) is an exclusively scientific journal dedicated to the dissemination and scientific development of Legal Medicine and Medical Expertise in Brazil and worldwide. It is a free, open access journal edited by ABMLPM and published by Indexa.

 

1. Conditions for publication

1.1 Originality and relevance

Manuscripts must be unpublished and deal with topics in legal medicine, forensic medicine and medical expertise or related subjects. They should be destined exclusively for the Perspectives in Legal Medicine and Medical Expertise, and simultaneous submission to other publications is not allowed.

1.2 Responsibility of authors, ethics, legal standards and good practices

Articles are submitted exclusively through Perspective’s eletronic submission system. To proceed with submission, authors must agree to these norms and to the terms of our Publication Agreement. Please take a minute to get acquanted with these terms by clicking here. They declare that, by submitting an article, the authors declare compliance with the law and respond exclusively for any infingements. Amongst their responsibilities are:  

• compliance with copyrights and other rights of third parties. Includes co-authors’ rights, from which the corresponding author must obtain permission.
• veracity of the information presented.
• use of good practices and professional ethics in the studies carried out, including the informed consent of the individuals studied.
• originality of the article and all its images, graphics and elements, or obtaining permission for reproduction and inclusion of due credits.
• compliance with image rights and obtaining permission to include images of individuals and trademarks.
• absence of plagiarism. Plagiarism is considered to be the presentation of a concept or content authored by third parties as being original or without identifying the authors, the excessive use of excerpts from other authors even with due credit, an article composed of third party content without the addition of original concept or content, among others. Authors of plagiarized articles are subject to penalties provided for in international laws.

PERSPECTIVES follows the standards established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to guide its practices and in our guidance to the conception and execution of manuscripts, deal with ethical issues and define which participants in the production of the article can be considered authors. Find out more at www.icmje.org.

The author submitting the article will be asked to inform the collaboration of each author in the production of the article, according to the CRediT glossary criteria.

1.3 Conflict of interest

When submitting an article, the person in charge should inform the sources of funding for the research. If there is any conflict of interest that may have affected the result disclosed by the article, this must be informed. Conflicts of interest are situations in which the author has an incentive to divulge results that improve the reader’s perception of a particular concept, procedure or product.

When invited to review an article, a peer-reviewer is also asked to disclose any conflicts of interest and the invitation is decline should any conflict be informed.

1.4 Clinical Trials and Human and Animal Experimentation

In Brazil, clinical trials involving drugs are only permitted with Anvisa’s authorization through registration in SISNEP – Sistema Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa – and REBEC – http://www.ensaiosclinicos.gov.br/. Articles including clinical trials should report this registration number before the title (see manuscript model). Foreign authors must adapt to national regulation regarding this type or research.

Studies involving human and animal experimentation, including use of private data collected from patients’ examinations, must be approved by an ethics committee recognized by the National Health Council (CNS) or its national equivalent at the country of origin and registered on the PROSPERO database. This information must be entered in the appointed field during submission.

1.5 Copyrights, preprint and postprint

PERSPECTIVES is an open access publication. In order to have your article published, authors must accept the conditions specified by the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, allowing their article to be republished and distributed freely by third parties, without prior authorization from the authors, publishers or publishers, always citing the authors properly and the original publication. For more information, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. Click here to download the terms of our Publication Agreement, to which authors must agree when submitting a manuscript. Authors retain all copyrights to their articles.

PERSPECTIVES allows the deposit of manuscripts in preprint depositories and approved articles in postprint depositories. According to the terms of CC BY license, after approval and publication, deposits must contain a link to the article at PERSPECTIVES website.

               1.6. ORCID ID for each author

All authors must be registered with academic database ORCID. Registration is free and can be completed at https://orcid.org/register.  During submission, it is mandatory to copy the link to the ORCID page of each author. Wrong links may cancel the publication of approved articles. 

We encourage authors to register with Academia.edu and Research Gate so their names may be linked to their articles in these popular databases.

2. Submitting

Manuscripts must be submitted through our electronic submission system Please click here to register and begin your submission.

Articles must be submitted in Portuguese, English or Spanish, including title and abstract in English and Portuguese. Articles will be published in the original language. Authors are responsible for translation costs. Although eletronic translators produce average quality text, a final revision by a fluent speaker is necessary for approval. 

3. Form and formatting

PERSPECTIVES accepts original research articles, literature review articles, case reports and original proposal on judicial arguments relevant to legal medicine and medical expertise, which are considered original.

Click here to download a template with format and formatting instructions.

We also publish doctrinary discussions, letter to the editor, comments on published articles, notes, book and product reviews, personal point-of-view and other types of articles. Those will not be considered scientific articles and therefore will not be peer-reviewed, assigned a DOI nor be included in third party indexes. Non-scientific articles may disregard suggested form but should comply with the formatting in the template, including the mandatory ORCID link for all authors. 

 

4. Selection, peer-review and publication

PERSPECTIVES respects the double blind simultaneous peer review process. The average period between submission and publication of articles with one round of peer review is 3 months. The process follows the flow described below, with estimated deadlines indicated in parentheses:

1. Complete submission (day 0);
2. Editor-in-chief screens and sends to the appropriate section editor (by day 7);
3. If within the scope and minimum requirements: section editor appoints two reviewers (members of the editorial board or ad-hoc reviewers) (by day 15);
4. Reviewers accept or decline invitation to review, a new reviewer is appointed in case of invitation not accepted (by day 35);
5. Article is approved, rejected or receives one or both reviewers’ reports with editing suggestions (by day 50)
6. Author submits revised version (by day 65)
7. Return to step 5. If new revisions are suggested by at least one reviewer, the second round of peer review begins. If the article is not approved or rejected by both reviewers at the end of the 3rd round of peer review, the submission and reviewers’ opinions are forwarded to the editors for a decision.

If approved at any time:

1. spelling check (up to 7 days)
2. Paperpass electronic plagiarism check (up to 3 days)
3. publication (up to 7 days)

If rejected by only one of the reviewers: article and its opinions are sent to the editors for a decision to continue with revision or reject.

The entire process is supported and its deadlines are controlled by the executive editor. 

Authors who do not respond to the demands of the review process within the deadline will have their submissions archived and must complete a new submission. The correct formatting of the article, its technical quality and review by experienced academics before submission contribute to a speedy approval.

To guarantee impartiality, the review is carried out “blindly”, without identifying the authors and they do not know the names of the reviewers who evaluate their article.

The deadlines indicated in the schedule are an average, and can be affected by several factors: low quality or non-compliance with standards in the submitted article, difficulty in assigning reviewers, periods of high volume of submissions received, delay in responses from those involved, technical problems, among others. PERSPECTIVES does not commit to deadlines. Once submitted, an article can only be removed from the publication flow by communicating the wish to cancel submission via the submission system or by email.

The main criteria for evaluating articles during the review process are originality, relevance (contribution to the specialty), survey of existing literature on the topic, organization and presentation, clarity, adequacy of the method and its execution to the indicated objective, adequacy and objectivity of results.

Non-scientific and editorial articles are evaluated only by the editor-in-chief or a member of the editorial board appointed by him and immediately published if approved.

PERSPECTIVES reserves the right not to publish articles received, even if approved by the reviewers.

In case of discontinuation, access to all published content is guaranteed through REDIB’s website (Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico). (in progress).

4.2. Publication of papers presented in ABMLPM Congresses

The articles presented at the ABMLPM Congresses have their summaries published in a special supplement. The submission of these articles in full by the authors is mandatory and must be done through PERSPECTIVES regular submission system no later than 30 days after the first day of the event. They must be formatted and adapted to the journal’s standards, which may be different from those of the Congress. Once submitted, they go through the regular peer review process, so approval and publication are not guaranteed.

5. Publication and financing costs

The publication of articles on PERSPECTIVAS is free of costs for authors. All production costs are financed by the Brazilian Association of Legal Medicine and Medical Expertise, responsible for the publication.

Updated in August 2024.