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About

Aims and scope

Patient Safety in Surgery is an open access journal that publishes articles on all issues related to safety and quality of patient care in surgery and surgical subspecialties.

The journal provides a scientific platform for specialists from all surgical fields and for other healthcare professionals to report, discuss, debate, and critically review all aspects related to errors, complications, and other safety issues in the management of patients undergoing surgical procedures.

Morbidity and mortality in patients undergoing surgical procedures may, in large part, be preventable. The key to improving the management of adverse events in surgery is understanding their causes. These range from “simple” individual errors in surgical technique and perioperative decision making to system errors in hospitals, and extend as far as to general healthcare issues in politics.

An evidence-based approach to quality improvement in surgical care must include the analysis of incidence and pattern of adverse events. This is particularly true for the analysis of procedures that did not result in an adverse event but had strong potential to, thus bearing the risk of these cases being neglected or trivialized, instead of being reported and reviewed as a “true” complication.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. Patient Safety in Surgery therefore levies an article-processing charge of £2090.00/$2990.00/€2490.00 for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable.

If the corresponding author's institution participates in our open access membership program, some or all of the publication cost may be covered (more details available on the membership page). We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. For other countries, article-processing charge waivers or discounts are granted on a case-by-case basis to authors with insufficient funds. Authors can request a waiver or discount during the submission process. For further details, see our article-processing charge page.

Visit Springer Nature’s open access funding & support services for information about research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs.

Springer Nature offers agreements that enable institutions to cover open access publishing costs. Learn more about our open access agreements to check your eligibility and discover whether this journal is included.

For more information on APCs please see our Journal Pricing FAQs

Open access

All articles published by Patient Safety in Surgery are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

As authors of articles published in Patient Safety in Surgery you are the copyright holders of your article and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate your article, according to the BMC license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BMC can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Indexing services

All articles published in Patient Safety in Surgery are included in:

  • Cinahl
  • Citebase
  • DOAJ
  • Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)
  • OAIster
  • PubMed
  • PubMed Central
  • Scopus
  • SOCOLAR
  • ​Zetoc

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can also access all articles published by BioMed Central on SpringerLink.
We are working closely with relevant indexing services including Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) to ensure that articles published in Patient Safety in Surgery will be available in their databases when appropriate.

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. You can read more about the peer-review process here.

Patient Safety in Surgery operates a single-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous.

The benefit of single-blind peer review is that it is the traditional model of peer review that many reviewers are comfortable with, and it facilitates a dispassionate critique of a manuscript.

Submitted manuscripts will first be screened by the Editors-in-Chief for suitability for peer review. All manuscripts that are deemed suitable for peer review will be assigned to at least two expert reviewers. The Editors-in-Chief will decide on whether to accept or reject a manuscript based on reviewer recommendations. If required, manuscripts will be sent to a statistician. Where reviewer’s comments are conflicting, the Editorial Board or an additional independent reviewer will be consulted to help reach an editorial decision. Should an author be unsatisfied with the editorial decision, members of the Editorial Board will analyze the authors’ justification and additional reviewers may be sought, if appropriate.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Patient Safety in Surgery should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Citing articles in Patient Safety in Surgery

Articles in Patient Safety in Surgery should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. Patient Saf Surg [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Patient Saf Surg 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should follow the procedure outlined in the BMC Editorial Policies.

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

Patient Safety in Surgery's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. 

Speed of publication

Patient Safety in Surgery offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

Flexibility

Online publication in Patient Safety in Surgery gives you the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Patient Safety in Surgery are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Patient Safety in Surgery’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

In addition, articles published in Patient Safety in Surgery may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Patient Safety in Surgery. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BMC is available here.

Copyright

As an author of an article published in Patient Safety in Surgery you retain the copyright of your article and you are free to reproduce and disseminate your work (for further details, see the BMC license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BMC, please click here.

Editors-in-Chief
Prof Philip F Stahel, Mission Health, USA
Prof Pierre-Alain Clavien, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland

Managing Editors
Prof Sebastian Weckbach, University Hospital Ulm, Germany
Dr Navid Ziran, St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, Arizona, USA

Senior Editor Emeritus
Dr Steven Schelkun,  AO North America, USA
Prof George Youngson, Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Scotland

Associate Editors
Prof Walter Biffl, Scripps Memorial Hospital, USA
Prof Markus W Buechler, University Hospital Heidelberg, Germany
Dr Jeffrey Galinkin, The Medical Center of Aurora, USA
Prof Christoph E Heyde, University Hospital Leipzig, Germany
Prof James Kellam, Carolinas Medical Center, USA
Dr Fernando Kim, Denver Health Medical Center, USA 
Prof Martin A Makary, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, USA 
Dr Claudia Medina, IPS Universitaria Clinica Leon XIII, Colombia
Prof Philip S Mehler, Eating Recovery Center, USA
Prof Ernest E Moore, Denver Health Medical Center, USA
Prof Hans-Christoph Pape, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland
Prof Rodrigo Pesántez, Universidad de los Andes Bogotá, Colombia
Dr Carlos Rodriguez, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, USA
Prof Andrew H Schmidt, Minnesota University, USA
Dr Andie Slivinski, Mission Health, USA
Dr Jeffrey Smith, Orthopaedic Trauma & Fracture Specialist Medical Corp, USA
Prof Wade R Smith, Swedish Medical Center, USA
Prof Adam Starr, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, USA
Prof Charles Vincent, University of Oxford, UK
Dr Boris A. Zelle, University of Texas Health, USA
Prof Bruce Ziran, Hughston Clinic at Gwinnett Medical Center, USA


Statistical Advisors
Dr Stefan Sauerland, Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Healthcare (IQWiG), Germany
Dr Allison E Williams, Bay Pines VA Health Care System, USA

Editorial Board
Prof Fernando Baldy dos Reis, UNIFESP-Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil
Prof Jeffrey Barkun, McGill University Health Center, Canada
Dr Nathan C Butler, University of California Davis, USA
Dr. Bayley E. Clarke, Georgetown University, USA
Dr Ted Clarke, Colorado Physician Insurance Companies (COPIC), USA
Prof Nicolas Demartines, University Hospital Lausanne (CHUV), Switzerland
Dr Johannes Fakler, University of Leipzig, Germany
Prof Beat Gloor, University of Bern, Switzerland
Dr Andrew Grose, Westchester Medical Center, USA 
Prof Dieter Hahnloser, University Hospital Lausanne (CHUV), Switzerland
Prof Jiandong Hao, The Third Hospital of Hebei Medical University, China
Prof Kirk Hogan, University of Wisconsin, USA
Prof Markus Huber-Lang, University of Ulm, Germany
Dr Kyros Ipaktchi, Denver Health Medical Center, USA
Dr Thilo John, DRK Hospital Berlin-Westend, Germany 
Dr Jeffrey L Johnson, Henry Ford Hospital, USA
Prof Jeffry Kashuk, Tel Aviv University-Sackler School of Medicine, Israel
Prof Christian K Lackner, LMU University, Germany
Dr Geeta Lal, University of Iowa, USA
Dr Alan Lembitz, Colorado Physician Insurance Companies (COPIC), USA
Prof Matthias Majetschak, Loyola University, USA
Dr Timothy Moore, MetroHealth Medical Center, USA
Dr John Mukhopadhaya, Mukhopadhaya Orthopaedic Clinic, India
Prof Giuseppe Nigri, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Dr Lena Nilsson, Linköping University Hospital, Sweden
Dr Fredric Pieracci, Denver Health Medical Center, USA
Dr Andrew Robson, University of Edinburgh, UK
Dr Jeffrey Varnell, Colorado Physician Insurance Companies (COPIC), USA
Dr Ryan Will, Olympia Orthopaedic Association, USA
Dr Gerald Zarlengo, Colorado Physician Insurance Companies, USA