About Journal

Who are we?

BACKGROUND

In 1998 the Spanish Society of Nephrology Nursing decided to create an official body to disseminate the research work, clinical casework experiences and reviews of its members, thus replacing the former BISEAN and BISEDEN, which although were not scientific journals, did regularly publish research work.

This is how the journal of the Spanish Society of Nephrology Nursing came about and editorial responsibilities were no longer managed by the Board of Directors. The first Editorial Board and publishing directors were appointed, and a peer-review process was embarked on, using the publication guidelines from international databases for nursing journals, aiding the journal’s later inclusion in the majority of these databases. In 1999 it started to include original abstracts in English, and be cited in its abbreviated form — Rev Soc Esp Enferm Nefrol.

Over time small editorial changes were incorporated, improving the journal’s overall format, and an increasing number of articles were published in their original language. In 2007 it was revamped, although still under the same handle, and published in a smaller and more manageable format, to fulfil the requirements for inclusion in international databases. In 2010 the centre pages of news were taken out for reasons of scientific quality.

In 2012 it adopted the name of Enfermería Nefrológica, the official journal of the Spanish Society of Nephrology Nursing. Further superficial changes were made, as well as changes to the editorial process, in line with all the Health Science publication database requirements. It also began to be cited by the abbreviation Enferm Nefrol.

Since 1998 the Spanish Society of Nephrology Nursing has made the Enferm Nefrol journal digitally available on its website, for all of the scientific community to read freely and without charge. Enfermería Nefrológica comes out every three months and uses the Open Journal System (OJS) platform to administrate the arbitration process and act as an archive.

AIMS

The aims of the Enfermería Nefrológica journal are to:

Promote increased knowledge through the publication of original research and other work that may help nephrology nursing professionals to improve their daily practice.
Serve as a means of consultation for nursing professionals who work in nephrology, as well as other professionals with an interest.
Provide knowledge on current practices in nephrology nursing, as well as offer information relating to all aspects of care for patients with renal disease.
Act as a bridge for scientific knowledge coming from Ibero-American nephrology nursing associations.

EDITORIAL POLICY

Focus, Scope and Periodicity.

Enfermería Nefrológica is the official scientific journal of the Spanish Society of Nephrology Nursing. Its abbreviated title is Enferm Nefrol, which must be used in bibliographies, footnotes, references and bibliographical references.

Enfermería Nefrológica sets out to be the leading nephrology nursing journal in Spanish and is working on a number of agreements with international associations and educational entities whose official language is Spanish. The journal regularly publishes four issues a year: one every three months; downloadable from the 30th of March, June, September and December. It is published online with a reduced print run. Although the journal is mainly published in Spanish, it also contains articles in English and Portuguese. It is aimed at nephrology nurses and does not charge for submissions, nor for publishing articles.

Enfermería Nefrológica publishes nursing research articles related to nephrology, high blood pressure, dialysis and transplants, which aim to increase scientific knowledge and ultimately lead to better renal patient care. It also accepts articles from other nursing fields or broader topics which result in greater professional knowledge of nephrological nursing.

Enfermería Nefrológica has editorial independence from its financing body (Spanish Society of Nephrology Nursing), which respects the decisions taken by the editorial team based on article quality. As such, the editorial team includes members belonging to this institution who have expressed a conflict of interest (financial, personal or intellectual).

EDITORIAL POLICY

Review Policy

Review system

>Enfermería Nefrológica will assign the article received to at least two experts who will review the article and make recommendations for its improvement, as well as a decision as to whether they will accept it. A double-blind review will be conducted, meaning that the experts will not know who the article belongs to, nor will the authors learn which experts have assessed their article. In the event of any dispute, the article will be sent to a third reviewer.

All submissions are initially assessed by the Editorial Board, who will check that the criteria established in the instructions for authors have been met. The author shall be informed should any of these requirements not have been fulfilled.

Following this verification, the documents will be sent confidentially to external reviewers, who will assess their scientific and academic quality. Reviewers selected will be professionals who have published on the same topic and have had at least one article published in indexed journals in the last two years and with whom there is no potential conflict of interest. Reviewers act as referees, giving their opinion on the quality of the work and making any relevant recommendations or comments for publication. Authors and reviewers will remain anonymous to each other.

After receiving the reviewers’ opinions, a decision is made: final acceptance, acceptance with minor modifications, acceptance with substantial modifications or rejection. The journal sends the reviewers’ opinions to the corresponding author, for them to consider.

Review deadlines

Initial notification. The authors will be automatically notified by the system when they submit an article for review, which serves as proof of submission. This notification is sent to the author’s email as soon as the author submits the article within the system.
Review process. The journal aims to communicate the inclusion or rejection of their work into the review system within 30 days.
Article publication. The journal aims to communicate the decision regarding the assessment of their articles within 100 days. This period is likely to be much shorter, but it all depends on the number of articles in review at the time.

General review criteria

In order for the article to pass the review process, the Editorial Board will initially assess:

How the article fits into the topic and the scope of the journal.

If the proposal is of interest and topical.
That it strictly follows journal publication guidelines in all aspects.

For the article to be accepted for publication it must fulfil the journal’s general guidelines, regardless of any of the specific considerations that reviewers may make. Articles that do not fulfil these guidelines will be rejected.

Reviewers

Enfermería Nefrológica has an extensive pool of external reviewers both in Spain and abroad. Reviewers are experts who independent from the circle of authors (not co-authors, colleagues, etc.).

Reviewers are assigned articles based on the specialisation of the main topic of the article to assess.

Every year the journal publishes a list of the reviewers who participated in the process during the previous year.

Reviewer guidelines

Competency: Reviewers must be specialists in the topic and subject matter of the article to evaluate. They must turn down any texts which they consider to fall outside of their competences or for which they lack sufficient knowledge.

Responsibility: Reviewers must abide by the following, undertaking to:

Only accept to review submissions for which they have the sufficient experience, committing to do so within the established deadlines.
Respect the confidentiality of the data that will be published, both during and after the review process.
Not use any information obtained within the review process for their own purposes or for any other person or institution.
Declare any potential conflicts of interest.
Not allow their opinion to be influenced by geography, politics or religion, or for any commercial reasons.
Be objective and constructive in their review, abstaining from being hostile or making any defamatory or disparaging personal remarks.
Know that the impersonation of a reviewer during the review process is considered a serious offence.

Acknowledgement: Reviewers will receive a certificate to show for the work they do for Enfermería Nefrológica.

Call for reviewers

If you are an expert in any of the subjects that are included in this journal and wish to participate in the process of assessing articles, you can register with the journal, complete your profile, document your scientific experience and indicate the topics you would be willing to review as an assessor. The Editorial Board will study your proposal and contact you.

Archiving and interoperability policy

Enfermería Nefrológica has its own local archiving and storage system in the institutional archives of its publishing entity. Access is free, allowing libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for preservation and recovery purposes. It also saves copies of its archives on various private servers for safeguarding and digital preservation.

The fact that the journal can be found in various dense databases, as well as in different archives means that these very archives and external services also aid digital preservation, for example in SciELO, RedAlyC (Network of Scientific Journals of Latin America, Spain and Portugal), REDIB (Iber-American Network of Scientific Knowledge and Innovation), Scimago and Dialnet.

Enfermería Nefrológica is committed to the long-term digital preservation of its contents and that’s why our website uses a cloud-based Open Journal Systems (OJS), under the Software as a Service (SaaS) modality, which is an open-source software developed by Public Knowledge Project (PKP), with its Private LOCKSS Network (PLN) initiative and the Portico service. It also relies on the digital preservation of Aura from AmeliCa.

The journal provides article metadata in accordance with the protocols of open-source initiatives, enabling the automated gathering from our research articles for inclusion in any other digital archive. The route for this is: https://enfermerianefrologica.com/revista/oai.

The journal also performs the following processes to guarantee preservation and keep its digital materials accessible in the long term:

Preservation metadata: The journal uses quality metadata through the DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) and OpenURL.
Persistent identifiers: All of the journal articles have had DOI (Digital Object Identifiers) since they were introduced in 2012.
Service infrastructures and interoperability data: The journal uses the OAI-PMH protocol which is enabled to be compatible with DRIVER, allowing it to be gathered by other distribution systems. The metadata is available at https://enfermerianefrologica.com/revista/oai.
Metadata publication: The journal’s metadata is published on DOAJ.
Archive integrity review: Archives are regularly reviewed for integrity using the tools available on the journal’s storage server.

Anti-plagiarism policy

Enfermería Nefrológica does not condone plagiarism and will not accept plagiarised material for publication under any circumstances.

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to:

Directly copying text, ideas, images or data from other sources with the corresponding, clear and due acknowledgement.
Recycling text from the authors’ own work without the corresponding referencing and approval by the editor (read more on recycling text in the policy on redundant publication, copying and recycling of text).
Using an idea from another source with modified language without the corresponding, clear and due acknowledgement.

In order to guarantee compliance with the publication quality standards, and maintain the originality and novelty of published work, the journal uses the Similarity Check service from Crossref to check for similarities during its peer-review process. All of the long articles submitted to Enfermería Nefrológica are processed by an anti-plagiarism system before being sent to peer review.

The service uses iThenticate technology from iParadigms, LLC., the main provider of anti-plagiarism solutions whose database contains millions of references.

Authors and reviewers also have a specific set of tools for detecting plagiarism: Grammarly, Plagium, Copionic, WriteCheck, PaperRater, Plagarisma.net, Viper, Plagarism, open-source or licensed platforms which oversee originality and keep plagiarism in check.

Procedure in the event of detecting plagiarism

In the event that the system detects plagiarism, the report with the results will be relayed to the authors together with the reference sources on which the comparison is based, for them to formulate an answer before any decisions being taken to reject the work.

Authors given a final plagiarism report will not be able to have their work published in the journal for five years.

The journal reserves the right to contact the institution to which the author(s) belong(s) in the event of confirming a case of plagiarism, both prior to and subsequent to publication.

Ethical principles

As a journal of international excellence, Enfermería Nefrológica follows a rigorous control procedure for the articles submitted to avoid poor scientific practices, namely the ethical code of the main international initiatives established by entities such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), aimed at both publishers and reviewers and authors.

Authors

Originality and plagiarism. The authors of submissions give their assurance that the work is original and that it does not contain parts from other authors or fragments from work already published by other authors. They also confirm the veracity of the data, i.e. that the empirical data has not been altered to verify hypotheses.

Multiple and/or repetitive publications. Authors should not publish articles in which they repeat the same results in more than one scientific journal. Simultaneous proposals of the same contribution to multiple scientific journals is considered ethically incorrect and reprehensible.

List of sources. Authors must always correctly indicate sources and contributions mentioned in the article.

Authorship. In terms of the authorship of submissions, authors guarantee that they have included those who have made a significant intellectual and scientific contribution to conceiving and planning of the work, interpreting the results or drafting the article. They also endeavour to have ranked the authors in a hierarchy depending on their level of responsibility and involvement.

Access and retention. Should the editors deem it appropriate, the authors of articles must also provide the sources or data upon which their research is based, which can be stored for a reasonable amount of time following publication and possibly be made accessible.

Conflict of interests and disclosure. All authors are obliged to expressly declare that there are no conflicts of interest that may have influenced on the results obtained or the proposed interpretations. Authors must also indicate any funding from agencies and/or projects used for the research article.

Mistakes in published articles. When an author identifies a significant mistake or an inaccuracy in their article, they will immediately inform the journal editors and provide all the information necessary to list the relevant corrections at the bottom of the article.

Responsibility. All authors accept responsibility for what they have written. Authors also promise to have carried out a current and relevant scientific literature review of the subject analysed, bearing in mind the various different schools of knowledge.

Reviewers

Contribution to the editorial decision. Peer reviewing is a procedure which helps editors to make decisions regarding the articles proposed and also allows authors to improve their submissions to the publication. Reviewers commit to reviewing both the scientific and literary quality of the work in the field of their knowledge and skills in a critical, honest, constructive an unbiased manner.

Respect for deadlines. Reviewers who do not feel competent in the subject matter to review or who may not be able to finish the assessment within the deadline must notify the editors immediately. Reviewers commit to assessing work as soon as possible in order to respect the deadlines, given that at Enfermería Nefrológica, turnaround times for submissions are limited and inflexible out of respect for the authors and their work.

Confidentiality. Every submission assigned must be treated as confidential. Therefore, these texts must not be discussed with other people without the express consent of the editors.

Objectivity. Peer reviews will be objective. Personal opinions regarding the submission’s authors are not appropriate. Reviewers are obliged to give sufficient reasons for their evaluations. Reviewers will hand back a comprehensive critical report with appropriate references in line with the Enfermería Nefrológica reviewer protocol and the public guidelines for reviewers; especially if they are advising that the work be rejected. They are obliged to warn the editors if substantial parts of the work have already been published or are under review at another publication.

Text visualisation. Reviewers agree to accurately indicating the bibliographical references of fundamental works potentially overlooked by authors. Reviewers must also inform the editors or any similarities or overlaps between the submission and other published work.

Conflict of interests and disclosure. Information that is confidential or obtained during the peer-review process must be considered confidential and cannot be used for personal purposes. Reviewers only review submissions where there are no conflicts of interest.

Editors

Publication decision. Editors will ensure the selection of the most qualified reviewers to critically and expertly assess the submission, with the least amount of bias possible. Enfermería Nefrológica selects two reviewers per submission, thus ensuring a peer review.

Honesty. Editors evaluate the articles submitted for publication only based on the scientific merit of their content, without discriminating against the race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin, nationality or political opinion of the authors.

Confidentiality. Editors and members of the working group promise not to disclose any information relating to the articles submitted for publication to other people who are not the authors, reviewers or editors. The editors and the Editorial Board commit to protecting the confidentiality of the submissions, their authors and reviewers, such that anonymity maintains the intellectual integrity throughout the entire process.

Conflict of interests and disclosure. Editors commit to not using any of the content from the submissions for publication in their research without the written consent of the author(s).

Respect for deadlines. Editors are in charge of ensuring deadlines are met for reviews and the publication of accepted work, to guarantee swift dissemination of research. They faithfully promise to meet the published deadlines (maximum of 30 days to initially accept/reject the submission from its receipt through the reviewing platform) and a maximum of 100 days from the start of the scientific review process by experts). Likewise, work will not be accepted and left on a waiting list for longer than publication in the following issue. Enfermería Nefrológica avoids waiting lists of work.

Good research practices and academic integrity

For research studies that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, authors must declare that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975, revised in 2013. According to point 23 of this declaration, an approval from appropriate ethics committee must be obtained before undertaking the research to confirm the study meets national and international guidelines. As a minimum, a statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board must be stated in Section ‘"Ethical issues" of the article.

Example of an ethical statement: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)."

For non-interventional studies (e.g. surveys, questionnaires, social media research), all participants must be fully informed if the anonymity is assured, why the research is being conducted, how their data will be used and if there are any risks associated. As with all research involving humans, ethical approval from an appropriate ethics committee must be obtained prior to conducting the study. If ethical approval is not required, authors must either provide an exemption from the ethics committee or are encouraged to cite the local or national legislation that indicates ethics approval is not required for this type of study. Where a study has been granted exemption, the name of the ethics committee which provided this should be stated in Section ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’ with a full explanation regarding why ethical approval was not required.

A written informed consent for publication must be obtained from participating patients. Data relating to individual participants must be described in detail, but private information identifying participants need not be included unless the identifiable materials are of relevance to the research (for example, photographs of participants’ faces that show a particular symptom). Patients’ initials or other personal identifiers must not appear in any images. For manuscripts that include any case details, personal information, and/or images of patients, authors must obtain signed informed consent for publication from patients (or their relatives/guardians) before submitting to Enfermería Nefrológica. Patient details must be anonymized as far as possible, e.g., do not mention specific age, ethnicity, or occupation where they are not relevant to the conclusions. A template permission form is available to download. A blank version of the form used to obtain permission (without the patient names or signature) must be uploaded with your submission. Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.

If ethical approval is not required by national laws, authors must provide an exemption from the ethics committee, if one is available. Where a study has been granted exemption, the name of the ethics committee that provided this should be stated, with a full explanation on why the ethical approval was not required.

If no animal ethics committee is available to review applications, authors should be aware that the ethics of their research will be evaluated by reviewers and editors. Authors should provide a statement justifying the work from an ethical perspective, using the same utilitarian framework that is used by ethics committees. Authors may be asked to provide this even if they have received ethical approval.

Enfermería Nefrológica endorses the ARRIVE guidelines for reporting experiments using live animals. Authors and reviewers must use the ARRIVE guidelines as a checklist. Editors reserve the right to ask for the checklist and to reject submissions that do not adhere to these guidelines, to reject submissions based on ethical or animal welfare concerns or if the procedure described does not appear to be justified by the value of the work presented.

Correction and retraction policy

All of the articles published in Enfermería Nefrológica are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and are permanently available in the final version that has been subjected to a double-blind review.

Enfermería Nefrológica publishes corrections or retractions articles following the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Retraction

Retraction is a mechanism to correct literature and alert readers to articles that have such erroneous or seriously flawed data or content that the findings and conclusions are not to be trusted. Unreliable data or content can be the result of an honest mistake, naive errors or poor research conduct.

Retractions articles can usually alert readers to cases of redundant publication, plagiarism, manipulated peer-reviews, reuse of material or data without authorisation, breach of copyright or another legal problem (for example defamation, privacy, legality), unethical research and/or failure to disclose a significant competitive interest which would have unduly influenced the interpretation or recommendations.

The Editorial Board will consider retracting an article from a publication if:

There is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable.
It contains plagiarism.
The findings have been previously published in other places without this source having been referred to or the editor being informed, or without the permission or justification to republish these findings (i.e. redundant publication).
It contains unauthorised data or material.
Copyright has been infringed or there is another serious legal problem (for example defamation, privacy).
It reports on research that is not ethical.
It has been published solely on the basis of a peer-review process which was compromised or manipulated.
The authors did not reveal a significant interest in the competition or conflict of interests which would have unduly affected the interpretation of the research.

The journal will withdraw publications as soon as possible after the editor decides that the publication is seriously flawed, misleading, or falls under any of the categories described above.

If only a small section of the articles provides flawed data or content, it is better to correct it with a correction in the printed journal and online.

Correction of an article

Corrections will be made for significant mistakes discovered after publication which could mislead readers.

Editorial note

In the event that there is a problem with an article, and until the investigation into it reaches a conclusion, an editorial note will be published to alert readers that this article is being reviewed.

Open access policy and copyright

Enfermería Nefrológica is an Open Access journal and all of its content is freely accessible at no charge for users or their institutions. Enfermería Nefrológica does not charge for submissions, nor for publishing articles. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, modify, search or link to full article texts from the journal without prior permission from the editor or author, in accordance with the definition of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). The reuse of work must be done under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Likewise, authors hold the copyright and guarantee that the journal is the first to publish the work and publish it under this licence.

Enfermería Nefrológica has also signed up to the Sant Joan d'Alacant Declaration in defence of open access to scientific publications, by the Group of Editors of Spanish Journals on Health Sciences (GERECS) and the principles of the communication infrastructure for scholarly publishing and open science AmeliCA .

Enfermería Nefrológica, in line with the standard requirements for submissions to biomedical journals (ICJME), considers an author of a piece of work to be a person who has significantly contributed to it, intellectually speaking, and therefore, to be included on the list of authors and be considered as such must:

- Have participated in the conception and design or in the acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of the research data which has resulted in this particular article, and

- Have participated in drafting the text and the possible revisions, and

- Have approved the final version to be published

- Simply gathering data does not justify authorship but will be added to the section of acknowledgements

User interaction Policy

Enfermería Nefrológica facilitates the use of interactive technologies, which allow users to participate bilaterally, allowing them to easily share the contents of the journal on various social networks and applications. These online platforms have established themselves as an emerging communication tool, moving on from being simply networks of contacts to having a more practical function, and becoming almost a requirement for disseminating work and knowledge in communities of interest.

Enfermería Nefrológica includes the Hypothes.is tool on the pages of its published articles, allowing for annotations and commentaries on the html pages. This integration helps collaborative readers, allowing researchers to identify social needs and exchange knowledge. This tool allows users to make friendly annotations and discussions on the scientific content that it finds on the website and helps to encourage other ways of reading comprehension and collaborative reading, all online.

Enfermería Nefrológica includes free use reference managers such as Mendelay, Zotero and Ednote. It also includes the Bibtex tool which facilitates consistent bibliographic referencing by separating the bibliographical information from its presentation.

Policy on the use of Artificial Intelligence models

Authors are responsible for the submitted work's accuracy, completeness, and originality, including any use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and that the submitted work does not infringe the rights of third parties.

Authorship attribution entails responsibility for the submitted work and copyright, as well as the ability to address potential claims. These can only be attributed and performed by humans and cannot be applied to AI models.

Authors must not include AI or AI-assisted technologies as authors or co-authors of postulated work, nor must they cite an AI product as an author. Therefore, generative artificial intelligence tools, including NLP (natural language processing) or LLM (large language models) systems, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Bard, Claude, Perplexity, or Bing Chat, among others, cannot be considered authors in the journal International Politics because they do not meet its authorship criteria.

Authors of manuscripts submitted to the journal are responsible for transparently declaring whether they have used any artificial intelligence model during the preparation of their work, specifying the name and version of the model, for what purposes it has been used, and specifying the sections of the manuscript in which this tool has been applied. This information may be completed in the section dedicated to this purpose in the Cover Letter accompanying the manuscript submission.

Artificial Intelligence models should only be used to improve readability, formatting, quality of writing and grammar, the language of the work, translation, to modify the tone and style of the text, or editing in general. They may not be used to replace vital authoring tasks such as creating content, producing knowledge and scientific results, drawing conclusions, or making recommendations. AI tools must be informed, transparent, ethical, and responsible.

Authors must also ensure that no plagiarism or other scientific misconduct arises from their use and that all sources of information used are correctly cited. On the other hand, claiming authorship of content generated by artificial intelligence tools constitutes scientific misconduct.

Peer reviewers should not upload manuscripts to this journal using software or other artificial intelligence technologies where confidentiality cannot be guaranteed. Even if AI-assisted technologies are used in such a way that the confidentiality of the manuscript can be guaranteed, reviewers who choose to use such technologies to facilitate their review must disclose their use and nature to International Policy and are responsible for ensuring that any AI-generated information and content incorporated in reviews is accurate, complete, and unbiased.

Manuscripts submitted to the journal Enfermería Nefrológica will be verified during the preliminary review process using available AI detection tools such as iThenticate, Оriginаlity, ZеrоGPT, Cоntеnt аt scаlе, Writеr and Copyleaks or any other.

If the editors detect undeclared or improper use of generative artificial intelligence in the writing of the submitted manuscript, they will contact the authors involved in this practice to inform them about the rejection of the manuscript.