The Avicenna Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Care provides a forum for publication of scholarly papers that report research findings, research-based reviews, discussion papers and commentaries which are of interest to an international readership of practitioners, educators, administrators and researchers in all areas of nursing, midwifery and the caring sciences.
Papers should address issues of international interest and concern and present the study in the context of the existing international research base on the topic. Those which focus on a single country should identify how the material presented might be relevant to a wider audience and how it contributes to the international knowledge base. Selection of papers for publication is based on their scientific excellence, distinctive contribution to knowledge (including methodological development) and their importance to contemporary nursing, midwifery or related professions.
Submission to this journal proceeds totally online and you will be guided stepwise through the creation and uploading of your files.

  Types of papers 
The Avicenna Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Care publishes original research, reviews, and discussion papers. In addition we publish editorials and letters.Where a case is made we will also publish protocols of trials which meet our general criteria for interest and significance.
Editorials — 1,000–2,000 words
Authors who have ideas for editorials which address issues of substantive concern to the discipline, particularly those of a controversial nature or linked directly to current/forthcoming content in the journal, should contact the Chairman (oshvandi umsha.ac.ir).
Research Papers — 2,000–7,000 words
Full papers reporting original research can be a maximum of 7000 words in length, although shorter papers are preferred. Research papers should adhere to recognised standards for reporting. 
Reviews and Discussion Papers — 2,000–7,000 words
• Reviews, including:
- systematic reviews, which address focused practice questions;
- literature reviews (scoping reviews, narrative reviews), which provide a thorough analysis of the literature on a broad topic;
- policy reviews, i.e. reviews of published literature and policy documents which inform nursing practice, the organisation of nursing services, or the education and preparation of nurses and/or midwives).
• Discussion Papers, i.e. scholarly articles of a debating or discursive nature.
Letters to the editor — up to 800 words and 10 references, from up to 5 authors
Designed to stimulate academic debate and discussion, the Editor invites readers to submit letters which should refer to and comment on recent content in the journal, introduce new comment and discussion of clear and direct relevance to the journal's aim and scope or briefly report data or research findings that may not warrant a full paper. Contributions that are of general interest, stimulating and meet the standards of scholarship associated with the Journal may be selected for publication. Contributions should be submitted as in the usual way.

Reporting guidelines 
The editors require that manuscripts adhere to recognized reporting guidelines relevant to the research design used. These identify matters that should be addressed in your paper. Checklists that identify essential matters that should be reported, based on the relevant reporting guidelines should be submitted with the manuscript. These are not quality assessment frameworks and your study need not meet all the criteria implied in the reporting guideline to be worthy of publication in the journal. For example, a controlled trial may or may not be blinded but it is important that the paper identifies whether or not participants, clinicians and outcome assessors were aware of treatment assignments.
Reporting guidelines endorsed by the journal are listed below:
•Observational cohort, case control and cross sectional studies - STROBE - Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology, http://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/strobe/
• Quasi-experimental/non-randomised evaluations - TREND - Transparent Reporting of Evaluations with Non-randomized Designs, http://www.cdc.gov/trendstatement/
• Randomised (and quasi-randomised) controlled trial - CONSORT - Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials, http://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/consort/
• Study of Diagnostic accuracy/assessment scale - STARD - Standards for the Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies, http://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/stard/
• Systematic Review of Controlled Trials - PRISMA - Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, http://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/prisma/
• Systematic Review of Observational Studies - MOOSE - Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology,http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10789670
• Qualitative studies - COREQ - Consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research, http://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/coreq
You are required to adhere to these guidelines (or a suitable recognized alternative) and to submit a completed checklist from the reporting guideline to assist the editors and reviewers of your paper. The guideline used must be indicated in the Author Checklist.

Copyright Notice 
 Do Notice that the papers published within this journal are subject to Copy Right. Although the access to all articles is open and free for everyone, Papers can only be used as said below:
1- The content of the journal is only for academic use. Researchers and authors can use the content of the journal if only they cite it properly.
2- The content may be used only for not-commercial uses. Sale, resale, license, loan, transfer or any other form of commercial exploitation are prohibited. 
3- Attribution is allowed if the work is acknowledged. It is acceptable only if it happens in form of a link-using the article DOI.
4- The author may do whatever he/she wishes with the version of the article submitted to the journal. Once the article has been accepted for publication, the author may post the accepted version of the article on his/her own personal website, his/her department's website.
5- The work published in this journal is attributed licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-noncommercial 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's author.

Ethics in publishing
The Avicenna Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Care is a signatory journal to the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, issued by the International Committee for Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).
All studies must be conducted to a high ethical standard and must adhere to local regulations and standards for gaining scrutiny and approval. The work described in your article must have been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/; EC Directive 86/609/EEC for animal experimentshttp://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/lab_animals/legislation_en.htm. This must be stated at an appropriate point in the article.
Informed consent and patient details 
Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent, which should be documented in the paper. Appropriate consents, permissions and releases must be obtained where an author wishes to include case details or other personal information or images of patients and any other individuals in an Elsevier publication. Written consents must be retained by the author and copies of the consents or evidence that such consents have been obtained must be provided to Elsevier on request. 
Conflict of interest 
All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could influence their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. If there are no conflicts of interest then please state this: 'Conflicts of interest: none'. 
Potential conflicts of interest do not necessarily preclude publication and authors are advised to err on the side of transparency and openness in declaring any relevant relationships.
Submission declaration and verification 
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis or as an electronic preprint, 
Contributors & Acknowledgements 
All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, (3) final approval of the version to be submitted.
In the covering letter to the editorial office, we ask you make a true statement that all authors meet the criteria for authorship, have approved the final article and that all those entitled to authorship are listed as authors. We ask that roles for each and every author be individually described, with reference to the criteria for authorship. Those who meet some but not all of the criteria for authors can be identified as 'contributors' at the end of the manuscript with their contribution specified. All those individuals who provided help during the research (e.g., collecting data, providing language help, writing assistance or proofreading the article, etc.) but who do not meet criteria for authorship should be acknowledged in the paper.
For papers with many authors we may ask that you give a corporate name for the research group (e.g. ATLAS Research Group) to appear at the front of the article and list all authors [as defined above] at the end of the paper. Any contributors and acknowledgements should be listed additionally, as described above.
Changes to authorship 
Authors are expected to consider carefully the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the original submission. Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript has been accepted and only if approved by the journal Editor. To request such a change, the Editor must receive the following from the corresponding author: (a) the reason for the change in author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed.
Only in exceptional circumstances will the Editor consider the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the Editor considers the request, publication of the manuscript will be suspended. If the manuscript has already been published in an online issue, any requests approved by the Editor will result in a corrigendum.
Role of the funding source : You are requested to identify who provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement then this should be stated.
Submission: Our online submission system guides you stepwise through the process of entering your article details and uploading your files. The system converts your article files to a single PDF file used in the peer-review process. Editable files (e.g., Word, LaTeX) are required to typeset your article for final publication. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, is sent by e-mail      
Essential title page information
• Title. Concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid abbreviations and formulae where possible.
• Author names and affiliations. Please clearly indicate the given name(s) and family name(s) of each author and check that all names are accurately spelled. Present the authors' affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the author's name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name and, if available, the e-mail address of each author.
• Corresponding author. Clearly indicate who will handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication. Ensure that the e-mail address is given and that contact details are kept up to date by the corresponding author.
• Present/permanent address. If an author has moved since the work described in the article was done, or was visiting at the time, a 'Present address' (or 'Permanent address') may be indicated as a footnote to that author's name. The address at which the author actually did the work must be retained as the main, affiliation address. Superscript Arabic numerals are used for such footnotes.
Title: The title should be in the format 'Topic / question: design/type of paper' and identify the population / care setting studied.(e.g. The effectiveness of telephone support for adolescents with insulin dependent diabetes: controlled before and after study). The country in which the study was conducted should not normally be named in the title.
Persian Abstract: Abstracts should be less than 250 words, and should not include references or abbreviations. Abstracts of research papers must be structured and should adopt the headings suggested by the relevant reporting guidelines (see below). In general they should include the following: Background and Objective, Materials and Methods, Results and Conclusions.
English Abstract: The components of this section are like the Persian abstract and should include the following main headings: Background and Objective, Materials and Methods, Results, Conclusion. The conformity of Persian and English abstracts is required.
Extended English Abstract: The extended abstract should be written in English and have a maximum of 1000 words. It should have subheadings like the main article and emphasize on the methodology and results of the article. The extended abstract should have the following structure: Background and Objective (Maximum of 150 words); Materials and Methods (Maximum of 300 words); Results (Maximum of 400 words); Conclusion (Maximum of 150 words). In the initial stage of submitting a manuscript, it is not necessary for all submitted manuscripts to have an extended abstract because an extended abstract is required for articles that have been accepted.
Persian Keywords: 3 to 10 keywords for the article should be selected that exactly match the English keywords. Keywords should be written in alphabetical order.
English Keywords: 3 to 10 keywords for the article should be selected from MeSH list that exactly match the Persian keywords. Keywords should be written in alphabetical order. Use the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) thesaurus or Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health (CINAHL) headings where possible (seehttp://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html).

Statistics: Standard methods of presenting statistical material should be used. Where methods used are not widely recognised explanation and full reference to widely accessible sources must be given. Exact p values should be given to no more than three decimal places. Wherever possible give both point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for all population parameters estimated by the study (e.g. group differences, frequency of characteristics) Identify the statistical package used (please note that SPSS has not been "Statistical Package for the Social Sciences" for many years).
Tables and figures : There should be no more than five tables and figures in total and these should be included in the manuscript at the appropriate point. All tables and figures should be clearly labelled. If your manuscript includes more than 5 tables in total, or for very large tables, these can be submitted as Supplementary Data and will be included as such in the online version of your article. Please submit tables as editable text and not as images. Tables can be placed next to the relevant text in the article,. Number tables consecutively in accordance with their appearance in the text and place any table notes below the table body. Be sparing in the use of tables and ensure that the data presented in them do not duplicate results described elsewhere in the article. Please avoid using vertical rules.
Figure Legends: Ensure that each illustration has a legend. A legend should comprise a brief title (not on the figure itself) and a description of the illustration. Keep text in the illustrations themselves to a minimum but explain all symbols and abbreviations used.
References: Increased discoverability of research and high quality peer review are ensured by onlinelinks to the sources cited. In order to allow us to create links to abstracting and indexing services, such as Scopus, CrossRef and PubMed, please ensure that data provided in the references are correct. Please note that incorrect surnames, journal/book titles, publication year and pagination may prevent link creation. When copying references, please be careful as they may already contain errors. Use of the DOI is encouraged. Authors may choose to submit the names and institutional e-mail addresses of three potential referees. 
Trial or other study registration: We encourage the prospective registration of studies. Where a study has been registered please give the number in your Author Checklist (e.g. ISRCTN, IRCT) and include the registration number within the title, abstract or body of the paper as appropriate.
Appendices : Normally there should be no appendices although in the case of papers reporting tool development or the use of novel questionnaires authors must include a copy of the tool as an appendix unless all items appear in a table in the text.
Informed consent: Where applicable authors should confirm that informed consent was obtained from human subjects and that ethical clearance was obtained from the appropriate authority.
 Permissions : Permission to reproduce previously published material must be obtained in writing from the copyright holder (usually the publisher) and acknowledged in the manuscript. 
Abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms :As a rule the "Avicenna Journal of Nursing and Midwifery Care" does not permit the use of abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms (abbreviations for brevity). We make a limited number of exceptions but we do not allow the use of any abbreviations that are not widely recognised. The limited exceptions include cases where the abbreviated form has near universal recognition (e.g. USA), statistical terms and tests (e.g. df, t, ANOVA) and instruments that are generally identified by their initials or an abbreviation (e.g. SF36). As a rule, any abbreviations which the authors intend to use should be written out in full and followed by the letters in brackets the first time they appear, thereafter only the letters without brackets should be used. 
Word limits: Our experience suggests that all things being equal, readers find shorter papers more useful than longer ones. Given this, and competition for space in the Journal, shorter papers of between 2,000 and 3,500 words are preferred. However, full papers may be up to 7,000 words in length, plus tables, figures, and references. Ordinarily there should be no appendices although in the case of papers reporting tool development or the use of novel questionnaires it is usual to include a copy of the tool as an appendix. 
Review process
 The decision to publish a paper is based on an editorial assessment and peer review.Initially all papers are assessed by an editorial committee consisting of 2 or more members of the editorial team. The prime purpose is to decide whether to send a paper for peer review and to give a rapid decision on those that are not. Editorials and Letters may be accepted at this stage but in all other cases the decision is to reject the paper or to send it for peer review. Papers which do not meet basic standards or are unlikely to be published irrespective of a positive peer review, for example because their novel contribution is insufficient or the relevance to the discipline is unclear, may be rejected at this point in order to avoid delays to authors who may wish to seek publication elsewhere. Occasionally a paper will be returned to the author with requests for revisions in order to assist the editors in deciding whether or not send it out for review. Authors can expect a decision from this stage of the review process within 2–3 weeks of submission. Manuscripts going forward to the review process are reviewed by members of an international expert panel. All such papers will undergo a double blind peer review by two or more reviewers, plus an Associate Editor. We take every reasonable step to ensure author identity is concealed during the review process but it is up to authors to ensure that their details of prior publications etc. do not reveal their identity. Authors who reveal their identity in the manuscript will be deemed to have declined anonymity and the review will be single blind (i.e. authors do not know reviewers' identities). We aim to complete the review process within 8 weeks of the decision to review although occasionally delays do happen and authors should allow at least 12 weeks from submissions before contacting the journal. The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to the final decision regarding acceptance.
Double-blind review: This journal uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author name(s) are not allowed to be revealed to one another for a manuscript under review. The identities of the authors are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa.     
All submissions
The following documents are needed for all submissions.
Title page (with author details) – This should include the title, authors' names and affiliations, and a complete address for the corresponding author including telephone and e-mail address.
Blinded manuscript (no author details) – The main body of the paper (including the references, figures, tables and any Acknowledgements) should not include any identifying information, such as the authors' names or affiliations. Please ensure that the manuscript includes page numbers for ease of reference during the review process.
Covering letter – to the editor in which you detail authorship contributions and other matters you wish the editors to consider.
Publication fee:  Article submissions does not charge a publication fee. All process are free. 
Article submission