Sri Lanka Dental Association

Sri Lanka Dental Journal

Sri Lanka Dental Journal
Volume 52 Number 02
August 2022

Sri Lanka Dental Journal
Volume 52 Number 03
December 2022

The Journal

Sri Lanka Dental Journal (SLDJ) is the official journal of the Sri Lanka Dental Association (SLDA) with its first issue was published in 1970.  SLDA is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal, which is published triennially (Three issues per year) from 1970. It publishes original research articles, reviews, brief reports, updates and short communications to inform current research, policies, and evidence based public health practices in all areas that are of common interest to public health practitioners, clinicians, and health policymakers.

The journal provides an interdisciplinary forum for the dissemination of research material in a variety of disciplines relevant to public health such as demography, epidemiology, statistics, communicable and non-communicable diseases, health systems and policy, health service management, and health economics. 

The mission of the SLDJ is to encourage, empower and stimulate researchers and health professionals to publish high-quality research, which is novel and of public health importance in the local and global context.

ISSN 1391-07280

 

Open access

SLDJ provides open access to its contents immediately upon publication, without any subscription charge or registration fee, on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

 

Article processing charges

SLDJ does not charge any article-processing or publishing fee.

 

Indexing services

All articles published in the SLDJ are deposited with Crossref.

 

Editorial policies

SLDJ follows a double-blind peer-review process, in which each article is reviewed by two independent reviewers (names of the authors are not revealed to the reviewers and vice versa until the initial decision is made on the manuscript). The review will focus on the originality of the work, the scientific validity of the study and its findings, ethical conduct, and oral health implications. Reviewers comprise members of the Editorial Board including the members of the International Advisory Board, and local or international experts on specific content/field if required.

The two co-Editors are in charge of the peer-review process. Corresponding authors are requested to submit the manuscripts online using the Editorial Manager system (for more information, visit Submission Guidelines). When a manuscript is submitted to the SLDJ, it is initially assessed by the co-Editors on meeting the criteria for submission. If it does, the co-Editors will select two potential reviewers within the field of research and invite them to review independently and make recommendations in reviewers’ reports within two weeks of accepting the invitation to review. The editorial board will be meeting once a month (every third Thursday of the month), during which the recommendations made by the reviewers will be presented further, discussed, and finally, a decision will be made on the manuscript. Accordingly, the peer-review process until the first decision will usually take 2-6 weeks from the date of submission. Decisions include: ‘Rejection; no further review’ (Decline to publish), ‘Major revision’ (Resubmit for review), ‘Minor revision’ (Revision required), and ‘Accept’ (No further revisions)’.

If it is a re-submission, comments will be communicated to the corresponding author within one week of the meeting. Once received, the manuscript should be revised, while taking the reviewer’s comments into account. The revised manuscript is to be submitted online by the corresponding author within the next 4 weeks if it is a ’Major revision’, and within the next 2 weeks if it is a ‘Minor revision’. It should include a covering letter detailing the responses given to each reviewer comment in point-by-point form and be submitted online by the given deadline. The final decision will be made accordingly and communicated to the corresponding author. If the corresponding the author does not respond to three reminders sent by the Editorial Office after the deadline, the manuscript will be automatically removed from the system and will not be considered for further evaluation.

Peer review policy

SLDJ ensures that international standards of publication of biomedical research are maintained. Before submission, all authors should read and agree on the contents of the manuscript, and conform to the editorial policies given below. 

  • Ethics approval
  • Consent to participate
  • Research involving animals
  • Consent for publication
  • Registration of Trials and Systematic Reviews
  • Standards of reporting
  • Competing interests
  • Authorship
  • Acknowledgments
  • Duplicate publication, published abstracts/posters, and text recycling
  • Peer review
  • Confidentiality
  • Misconduct
  • Plagiarism

Archiving Policy

SLDA is available for LOCKSS harvesting, to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

Citing articles in SLDA

Articles in SLDA should be cited as: Authors. Title. SLDA year; volume[issue]: pages. DOI

Example: Mahesh PKB, Gunathunga MW, Arnold SM. Home-based temperature measuring practices and their association with selected events of disease sequelae among children treated as dengue in a tertiary care setting in Sri Lanka. Journal of the Sri Lanka Dental Association 2017; 22(1): 30–38. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4038/slda.v22i1.8084

Speed of publication

The SLDJ is committed to offering a fast publication procedure while adhering to the editorial and peer review policies of the journal. All articles considered for publication in the Journal are submitted online and will undergo the specified peer-review process. The Editorial Board aims to convey the first decision on the article within 2-6 weeks of its initial submission. After acceptance, articles will be published as a formatted PDF.

Copyright

Copyright of articles in the SLDA is retained by the author(s). The authors grant the Sri Lanka Dental Association a licence to publish the article and to identify itself as the original publisher. The SLDA is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0. This licence permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Authors are free to deposit their articles in an institutional repository.