About Journal of Radiological Protection

Journal of Radiological Protection publishes articles on all aspects of radiological protection, including non-ionising as well as ionising radiations. Fields of interest range from research, development and theory to operational matters, education and training. The very wide spectrum of its topics includes: dosimetry, instrument development, specialized measuring techniques, epidemiology, biological effects (in vivo and in vitro) and risk and environmental impact assessments.

The journal encourages publication of data and code as well as results.

Journal of Radiological Protection welcomes submssions of the following article types:

• Papers: full reports of original research on a theoretical or practical subject. The work covered should be substantive in nature and the description should be comprehensive, allowing the reader to follow the study throughout all its stages, so that the work could be repeated from the description given in the paper. The context of the study within the general body of knowledge of the subject should also be given. A paper should not normally exceed the equivalent of 8500 words, including tables and illustrations and consideration should be given to the optimal layout of the page.
• Reviews: authoritative articles which comprehensively summarizes the current state of knowledge in a particular area of relevance to radiological protection.
• Notes: brief reports of a single piece of work or technique or a short discussion of some aspect of radiological protection which adds to the existing literature. Notes can add information to previously published papers, or contain the early important results from work which is later written up as a paper. A note should not normally exceed the equivalent of 2500 words, including tables and illustrations.
• Practical matter articles: accounts of a particular radiological protection problem encountered in industry, medicine or the environment, and a description of the resolution of this problem. Practical matter articles are intended to provide assistance to those operational health physicists, hospital physicists, etc, who may encounter the same, or a similar, problem in their work.
• Opinion articles: allow the discussion of an issue of topical interest in radiological protection which is broader and less formal than would be acceptable in a Paper or Review. Opinion articles should be concise and deal with a specific matter of relevance.
• Memorandum: a report from an authoritative committee or organisation which provides information for those working in radiological protection.
• Letters to the Editor: comments upon work published previously in the journal, or comments upon matters of interest, such as proposed changes to legislation or to international recommendations. A title for the letter should be included. Letters to the Editor should be clearly marked ‘For Publication’. If a letter to the Editor comments upon an article previously published in the journal (with the exception of another letter to the Editor), then the author(s) of that article will be invited to reply to the letter, and the reply will normally appear in the same issue of the journal in which the letter is published.

Conflicts of interest

All authors and co-authors are required to disclose any potential conflict of interest when submitting their article (e.g. employment, consulting fees, research contracts, stock ownership, patent licenses, honoraria, advisory affiliations, etc). This information should be included in an acknowledgments section at the end of the manuscript (before the references section). All sources of financial support for the project must also be disclosed in the acknowledgments section. Conflict of interest statements are reviewed by the Editorial Board and could be queried.

A conflict of interest, as defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest.

Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, and intellectual beliefs. Authors should avoid entering in to agreements with study sponsors, both for-profit and non-profit, that interfere with authors’ access to all of the study’s data or that interfere with their ability to analyse and interpret the data and to prepare and publish manuscripts independently when and where they choose.

Abstract

Your abstract should give readers a brief summary of your article. It should concisely describe the contents of your article and include key terms (especially in the first two sentences, to increase search engine discoverability). It should be informative, accessible and not only indicate the general scope of the article but also state the main results obtained and conclusions drawn. The abstract should be complete in itself; it should not contain undefined acronyms/abbreviations and no table numbers, figure numbers, references or equations should be referred to. It should be suitable for direct inclusion in abstracting services and should not normally be more than 300 words.

Figures in Journal of Radiological Protection submissions

If an historical figure containing non-SI units is used, a conversion factor to the SI unit equivalent in the associated figure caption must be given.

Information about the publication criteria for Journal of Radiological Protection and the peer review process can be found on our Editorial policy page.

The following summary describes the peer review process for Journal of Radiological Protection, using the ANSI/NISO Standard Terminology for Peer Review:

• Identity transparency: single-anonymous
• Reviewer interacts with: Editor

Our Publishing Support website provides more information on our reviewing process as well as checklists in both English and Chinese language to help authors prepare their manuscripts for submission. 

If an article is not accepted for publication, we may offer the author the opportunity to transfer their submission to other suitable journals we publish. 

We work with our authors to help make their work as easy to discover as possible. Journal of Radiological Protection is currently included in the following abstracting and discovery services:

• ISI (SciSearch®, Science Citation Index®, Materials Science Citation Index®, Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition, ISI Alerting Services)
• PubMed Central
• Inspec
• Scopus
• Chemical Abstracts Service
• Compendex
• EMBASE/Excerpta Medica
• EMCare
• Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management Database
• INIS (International Nuclear Information System)
• Meta
• NASA Astrophysics Data System
• VINITI Abstracts Journal (Referativnyi Zhurnal)