Clinics in Orthopedic Surgery (CiOS; ISO abbreviation: Clin Orthop Surg), the official English journal of the Korean Orthopaedic Association (KOA), is an international, peer-reviewed journal launched in 2009. The journal intends to serve as a source of information and education for orthopedic surgeons and readers. It covers all clinical fields of orthopedic surgery including epidemiology, regenerative medicine, stem cell therapy, robotic surgery, and other computer assisted surgical technology, as well as clinically relevant basic research. It is a quarterly journal published in March 1, June 1, September 1, and December 1. Number of circulation of print copies is 800.

The journal aims to promote communication regarding orthopedic problems and advanced patient care. All manuscripts should be creative, informative, and useful for the diagnosis and treatment of orthopedic conditions. Articles in the following categories will be published: original articles, case reports, invited review articles, editorials, special reports, and letters to the Editor. All submissions, reviews, and decisions are processed on-line (http://ecios.org, http://cios.kr, http://ecios.kr).

CiOS is an open access journal. Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purpose, provided the original work is properly cited. It also follows the open access policy of PubMed Central at United States National Library of Medicine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). All the content of the journal is available immediately upon publication without embargo period.

Full text of CiOS has been archived in PubMed Central (PMC)/Europe PMC (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/971/) from the 1st issue of Volume 1, 2009.

According to the deposit policy (self-archiving policy) of Sherpa/Romeo (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/). authors cannot archive pre-print (i.e., pre-refereeing), but they can archive post-print (i.e., final draft postrefereeing). Authors can archive publisher’s version/PDF.

CiOS encourages data sharing wherever possible, unless this is prevented by ethical, privacy, or confidentiality matters. Authors wishing to do so may deposit their data in a publicly accessible repository and include a link to the DOI within the text of the manuscript.

All manuscripts should be written in English.

The papers will be peer-reviewed by two accredited experts in the orthopedic field. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for final decisions regarding the acceptance of a peer-reviewed paper.

For the policies on the research and publication ethics not stated in these instructions, Guidelines on Good Publication (http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines), Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org) or Good Publication Practice Guidelines for Medical Journals (https://kamje.or.kr/) can be applied.

Authors of manuscripts must disclose any potential conflicts of interest at the time of submission. Statements on conflict of interest have no influence on the editorial decision to publish. Disclosure form shall be same with ICMJE Uniform Disclosure Form for Potential Conflicts of Interest (http://www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf).

The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more coauthors. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way, and should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication.

Authors are responsible for the whole content of each article. Co-authorship should be based on the following 4 criteria: (1) Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; (2) Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (3) Final approval of the version to be published; and (4) Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

If any persons who do not meet above four criteria, they may be placed as contributors in Acknowledgements section. CiOS accepts notice of equal contribution for the first author, but does not allow multiple corresponding authors.

Submitted manuscripts must not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Redundant or duplicate publication of a paper may be considered acceptable under specific circumstances according to the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).

Any research that deals with a clinical trial should be registered with a primary national clinical trial registration site such as Korea Clinical Research Information Service (CRiS, http://cris.nih.go.kr), other primary national registry sites accredited by World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en/) or ClinicalTrial.gov (http://clinicaltrial.gov/), a service of the US National Institutes of Health.

Copies of written informed consent and Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for clinical research should be kept. If necessary, the editor or reviewers may request copies of these documents to resolve questions about IRB approval and study conduct.

Clinical research should be done in accordance of the the Helsinki Declaration (http://www.wma.net). Clinical studies that do not meet the Helsinki Declaration will not be considered for publication. Human subjects should not be identifiable, such that patients' names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, or other protected healthcare information should not be disclosed. For animal subjects, research should be performed based on the National or Institutional Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and the ethical treatment of all experimental animals should be maintained.

When the Journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflict of interest, ethical problem with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, complaints against editors, and etc., the resolving process will be followed by flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The discussion and decision on the suspected cases are done by Editorial Board.

Editorial board will continuously work for monitoring/ safeguarding publication ethics: guidelines for retracting articles; maintenance of the integrity of the academic record; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standard; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed; no plagiarism, no fraudulent data. Editorial board checks manuscripts to confirm the originality of text through Similarity Check. If the value of similarity index is unexpectedly high, it will be screened more precisely on plagiarism or duplicate publication.

Editors are always keeping following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to rejected/accept article; no conflict of interest respect to articles they reject/accept; acceptance of a paper when reasonably certain; promoting publication of correction or retraction when errors are found; preservation of anonymity of reviewers

All authors must sign and scan a copy of the journal’s “Financial Disclosure and Copyright Transfer” form, which is available on-line on the submission page. The completed form should be submitted at the time of manuscript submission.

Authors are required to submit their manuscripts after reading the following instructions. Any manuscript that does not conform to the following requirements will be considered inappropriate and may be returned.

The title page should contain the full title of the paper, the names of the authors, the academic degrees, and the institutions of the authors, institutional addresses, and open researcher and contributor ID (ORCID) of all authors. If authors are at different institutions, first present the institution where most of the work was carried out, and indicate individual departments and institutions by inserting a superscript letter immediately after the author’s name, and the same letter in front of the appropriate institution. To have ORCID, authors should register in the ORCID web site available from: https://orcid.org/. Registration is free to every researchers in the world. The name, address, e-mail address, telephone, and fax number of the corresponding author should be placed in the lower portion of the title page. The title should be expressed briefly, clearly, and concisely. It is not necessary to lead with expressions like “clinical research on –” or “the study on –.”

Each paper should start with an abstract not exceeding 350 words. The abstract should state the background, methods, results, and conclusions in each paragraph in a brief and coherent manner. Relevant numerical data should be included. Under the abstract, keywords should be inserted (maximum 5) and listed in the following order: anatomical name (illness), diagnosis, and treatment, for example, femoral head, avascular necrosis, core decompression, for a paper entitled, “Core decompression for the treatment of avascular necrosis of the femoral head.” Authors are recommended to use the MeSH database to find Medical Subject Heading Terms at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html. The abstract should be structured into the following sections.

References are not allowed in the abstract.

State the background or problem that led to the initiation of the study. Lead systematically to the hypothesis of the study, and finally, to a restatement of the study objective, which should match that in the Abstract. Do not include conclusions in the Introduction.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, when applicable, must be stated. Describe the study design (prospective or retrospective, inclusion and exclusion criteria, duration of the study) and the study population (demographics, length of follow-up). Explanations of the experimental methods should be concise, but yet enable replication by a qualified investigator.

Ensure correct use of the terms sex (when reporting biological factors) and gender (identity, psychosocial or cultural factors), and, unless inappropriate, report the sex and/or gender of study participants, the sex of animals or cells, and describe the methods used to determine sex and gender. If the study was done involving an exclusive population, for example in only one sex, authors should justify why, except in obvious cases (e.g., prostate cancer). Authors should define how they determined race or ethnicity and justify their relevance.

This section should include detailed reports on the data obtained during the study. All data in the text must be presented in a consistent manner throughout the manuscript.

In the Discussion, data should be interpreted to demonstrate whether they affirm or refute the original hypothesis. Discuss elements related to the purpose of the study and present the rationales that support the conclusion drawn by referring to relevant literature. Care should be taken to avoid information obtained from books, historical facts, and irrelevant information. A discussion of study weaknesses and limitations should be included.

All persons who have made substantial contributions, but who have not met the criteria for authorship, should be acknowledged here. All sources of funding for the study should be stated here explicitly.

All other types of manuscripts should meet the abovementioned requirements.

Review articles should focus on a specific topic. Publication of these articles will be decided upon by the Editorial Board.

Authors are warned that these have a high rejection rate.

Technical notes should not exceed 1,500 words. The abstract should be an unstructured summary not exceeding 150 words. The body of these manuscripts should consist of Introduction, Technique, Discussion, References, and Figures/Figure legends and tables (if applicable). References should not exceed 10. A maximum of 3 figures and 1 table are allowed.

Editorials are invited by the editors and should be commentaries on articles published recently in the journal . Editorial topics could include active areas of research, fresh insights, and debates in the field of orthopedic surgery. Editorials should not exceed 1,000 words, excluding references, tables, and figures.

Brief communications are short articles describing important clinical or experimental findings or great advances. A brief communication should be organized in the same way as original articles and should be limited to 1,500 words. The number of tables and figures in total should not exceed two.

The journal welcomes readers’ comments on articles published recently in the journal or orthopedic topics of interest.

Special reports are miscellaneous articles of special interest to the medical community. They are limited to 2,700 words excluding references, tables, and figures.

For the specific study design, such as randomized control study, study of diagnostic accuracy, meta-analysis, observational study and non-randomized study, authors are encouraged to also consult the reporting guidelines relevant to their specific research design. A good source of reporting guidelines is the EQUATOR Network (https://www.equator-network.org/) and the NLM (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/research_report_guide.html).