Matters Arising

Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research recognises the importance of post-publication commentary on published research as necessary to advancing scientific or academic discourse. Formal post-publication commentary on published papers can involve challenges, clarifications or, in some cases, replication of the published work and may, after peer review, be published online as Matters Arising articles, usually alongside a Reply from the original authors.

Matters Arising articles are interesting and timely scientific or academic comments and clarifications on original research papers published in the journal. These comments should be based on knowledge contemporaneous with the original paper, rather than subsequent scientific or academic developments.

If the submission serves only to identify an important error or mistake in the published paper, it will usually lead to the publication of a clarification statement (correction or retraction, for example). Please contact the journal for these cases. 

In all cases, the journal strongly encourages correspondents to first contact the authors of the paper directly as this can often resolve matters if it is a simple misunderstanding.

Matters Arising articles and Replies are bidirectionally linked with the original published paper. This journal does not consider Matters Arising articles on papers published in other journals. Contributions that do not comply with our submission criteria (see sections below) will not be considered.

Manuscript preparation and formatting

• The article title of the initial Matters Arising article should refer to, but not be identical to, the article title of the original published paper.
• The main text should be as concise as possible, and ideally not exceed 1,200 words.
• Contributions should start with a brief paragraph that summarizes the message of the article without specialized terminology, for a non-specialist readership. This paragraph should be used as the abstract for submission purposes.
• Manuscripts should have a simple message that ideally requires only one or two small figures or tables.
• The article should be measured in tone, and should not contain inflammatory or otherwise intemperate language.
• As a guideline, contributions may have up to 15 references; reference style is as for research articles.
• Supplementary Information is permitted at the editor's discretion.
• Contributions should be submitted by email to the Editor for initial assessment. Please use the contact email address for the journal. 

Editorial Process

The editors will decide how to proceed on the basis of the potential interest to readers, importance and timeliness of the contribution. Authors should submit their manuscript for initial consideration. 

Matters Arising submissions that meet the journal’s criteria are sent to the authors of the original paper for a formal response. The comments and formal response may then be sent to independent referees.

A Reply is published only when it adds to the debate, and not when it reiterates points already published. It should be confined to replying to the specific issue raised about the published paper.

Authors of the original publication must keep the information provided in Matters Arising articles confidential and must not use it for their own research or for any other purpose apart from replying to the comment.

We will not consider appeals against decisions not to publish Matters Arising articles unless the grounds for appeal consist of a previously overlooked and important scientific point and are clearly explained in these terms.

The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

Title page

The title page should:

• present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
  • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review"
  • or for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
• list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors
  • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
  • Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript
• indicate the corresponding author

Abstract

Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract should briefly summarize the aim, findings or purpose of the article. The Abstract should not exceed 250 words.

Keywords

Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

Main text

This should contain the body of the article, and may also be broken into subsections with short, informative headings.

List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.