Image from the cover: March 2009.

Image: Frog amphibian papilla stained for myosin VI (green) and otoferlin (red) - Quiñones et al., 2012

Image from the Cover: August 2015.

Image from the Cover: February 2013.

Image from the Cover: June 2013

Image: Anuran inner ear structures from Xenopus laevis, Rana pipiens, Eleutherodactylus limbatus - Mason et al., 2015

Image from the Cover: June 2015.

Image from the Cover: August 2012.

Image from the Cover: February 2018.

Image: Utricular otoconia from wild-type mice - Boyle et al., 2021.

Image: Temporal bone whole-mount from a PLP/CreERT::ROSA26-LacZ mouse - Gómez-Casati et al., 2010.

Image: Isolated guinea pig OHC - Hallworth et al., 2007

Image from the Cover: June 2009.

Image from the Cover: December 2009.

2.4

Impact Factor

2.8

5-year IF

160,919

Downloads (2021)

Welcome to the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology!

JARO is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research topics in relation to the content of the Annual ARO Mid-Winter Meeting with a focus on the auditory and vestibular systems.

Quotation

There is opportunity for the ARO community to determine how their data will be shared and how they wish to access data, perhaps through an ARO-supported mechanism. We understand that while there may not be an ideal common approach for all research areas within otolaryngology, there is an exciting opportunity for creating a resource(s) to promote the core science, diversity, integrity, collaboration, and education values of ARO.

EDITORIAL | AUGUST 2023 | ECKERT ET AL.

Accepted papers are copyedited and rapidly published in Online First, from which they are accessible via the Springer Nature website and on PubMed before being bundled in an online issue (six per year), with notifications to subscribers. For the convenience of authors, Springer Nature deposits all final manuscripts with PubMed Central at the time of Online First publication, with a one-year embargo. Alternatively, one may participate in Springer’s Open Choice program for full open access privileges. For authors whose institutions are participating in a new program called Read and Publish (Springer Compact) agreements, Springer Nature also provides open access services to help with funding. Such agreements are in place in several European countries.

 

JARO will not consider material that has been published, is in press or has been submitted elsewhere (abstracts excepted). Deposit of a manuscript prior to peer review with a preprint server (bioRxiv, arXiv, etc.) is acceptable. Authors must report the existence of such submissions in their cover letter, including the digital object identifier (DOI). After acceptance, the preprint version of the article should be updated with a link to the final accepted work at the journal publisher's website. JARO currently does not have a mechanism for the preprint server to directly submit manuscripts; submissions will require uploading the original documents through the Editorial Manager website. Note: PhD theses posted online in open access repositories are not considered to breach our exclusivity policy.

 

The journal operates a rapid triage system allowing authors to submit to a more appropriate journal without delay. Only the top 33% of papers, as judged by the Editor-in-Chief and Editors, are put through external peer review. The journal operates an anonymized peer-review system such that the identity of peer-reviewers and Editors is not made available to authors, but not vice versa. Original research articles, reviews and research letters are usually assessed by two independent experts in the field. Commentaries and letters to the Editor may be assessed internally by members of the editorial board. Authors must be prepared to provide additional information, original images or raw data if requested during the peer-review process. When it is deemed necessary, articles will be seen by an additional statistical reviewer.

The journal aims to return a decision on a peer-reviewed paper in less than a month.

 

JARO is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). These guidelines set out the basic principles and standards to which all peer reviewers should adhere during the peer-review process. Referees should familiarize themselves with these guidelines prior to reviewing papers for JARO.

Prior to agreeing to review a paper, reviewers should disclose any relationships or activities that could bias their opinion of the manuscript, and should recuse themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if the potential for bias exists. Such relationships may be personal, financial, intellectual, professional, political or religious in nature.

In addition, JARO considers a conflict of interest if:

  • Employed at the same institution as any of the authors
  • Current or recent (e.g., within the past 3 years) mentors, mentees, close collaborators or joint grant holders
  • Close personal relationship with any of the authors

All new manuscripts are passed through iThenticate, which identifies copied passages and recycled text. The results from iThenticate are evaluated editorially, and may be grounds for rejection without review, or authors may receive a request for modification of the manuscript prior to entering it into review.

 

In accordance with guidelines issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), JARO requires registration of clinical trials in a public trials registry at or before the time of first patient enrollment. A clinical trial is defined as any research project that prospectively assigns people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome. Health-related interventions are those used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome; examples include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, dietary interventions, quality improvement interventions, and process-of-care changes. Health outcomes are any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants, including pharmacokinetic measures and adverse events.

Purely observational studies (those in which the assignment of the medical intervention is not at the discretion of the investigator) do not require registration.

The ICMJE accepts registration in any registry that is a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) that includes the minimum acceptable 24-item trial registration dataset or in ClinicalTrials.gov, which is a data provider to the WHO ICTRP. The trial registry number should be included at the end of the Abstract.

Reports of randomized controlled trials should include the checklist items set out in the CONSORT guidelines, as well as a patient flow diagram. See the CONSORT website for further details. Authors must submit a completed CONSORT 2010 checklist along with the original trial protocol (including statistical analyses to be undertaken). For reports of non-pharmacological treatment interventions, please use the appropriate extension of the CONSORT statement.

 

Authors of papers containing cropped gels, western blots and immunofluorescence images are required to upload, at the point of submission, a separate PDF or PowerPoint file (distinct from any other supplementary material) that displays the entire unedited gel/image. Authors should indicate clearly which bands were used in which figure/figure part.

All potentially accepted manuscripts may undergo image forensics analysis as part of the review process.

JARO has adopted the following statement developed by Cell Press as its policy on the manipulation of digital images:

Authors should make every attempt to reduce the amount of post-acquisition processing of data. Some degree of processing may be unavoidable in certain instances and is permitted provided that the final data accurately reflect the original. In the case of image processing, alterations must be applied to the entire image (e.g., brightness, contrast, color balance). In rare instances where this is not possible (e.g., alterations to a single color channel on a microscopy image), any alterations must be clearly stated in the figure legend and in the methods section. Groupings and consolidation of data (e.g., cropping of images or removal of lanes from gels and blots) must be made apparent by the arrangement of figures (e.g., dividing lines) and should be explicitly indicated in the text of the figure legend. Data comparisons should only be made from comparative experiments, and individual data should not be utilized across multiple figures. In cases where data are used multiple times (e.g., multiple experiments were performed simultaneously with a single control experiment), this must be clearly stated within each figure legend. In the event that it is deemed necessary for proper evaluation of the manuscript, authors will be required to make the original unprocessed data available to the editor.

Image editing software and investigative techniques will be used to screen images in potentially acceptable papers to identify any manipulation. Any untoward manipulation will be investigated by the Scientific Integrity Panel following guidelines set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

 

Submission to JARO implies that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, as long as participant confidentiality is not breached.

JARO requires authors to make available to readers all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supplementary files whenever possible. Please see Springer Nature’s information on recommended repositories. General repositories—for all types of research data—such as figshare and Dryad may be used where appropriate.

Where a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories exists, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory. Persistent identifiers (such as DOIs and accession numbers) for relevant datasets must be provided in the paper.

For the following types of data set, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory: 

MANDATORY DEPOSITION 

SUITABLE REPOSITORIES 

Protein sequences 

Uniprot 

DNA and RNA sequences 

Genbank 
DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ) 
EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (ENA) 

DNA and RNA sequencing data 

NCBI Trace Archive 
NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) 

Genetic polymorphisms 

dbSNP 
dbVar 
European Variation Archive (EVA) 

Linked genotype and phenotype data 

dbGAP 
The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) 

Macromolecular structure 

Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) 
Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BMRB) 
Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) 

Microarray data (must be MIAME compliant) 

Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) 
ArrayExpress 

Crystallographic data for small molecules 

Cambridge Structural Database 

 

Datasets that are assigned DOIs by a data repository may be cited in the reference list. Data citations should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite: authors, title, publisher (repository name), identifier. For more information, see Research Data Policy Frequently Asked Questions.

JARO encourages authors to provide a statement of data availability in their article. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found, including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analyzed or generated during the study. Data availability statements can also indicate whether data are available on request from the authors and when no data are available, if appropriate. Click here for examples of data availability statements, including examples of openly available and restricted access datasets.

Springer Nature provides a research data policy support service for authors and editors. This service provides advice on research data policy compliance and on finding research data repositories but does not advise on specific manuscripts.

 

In general, by submitting a manuscript to JARO, the authors are agreeing to abide by the guidelines stated here concerning sharing of research materials.

In rare instances, considerations of time, money or personnel may make sharing of materials impossible. In such a case, the authors must explain the circumstances in a cover letter submitted with the manuscript, indicating that they are prepared to make every effort to assist others in creating their own materials. The Editor-in-Chief of JARO may then determine on a case-by-case basis whether or not to accept the manuscript for review. If it is demonstrated to the Editor-in-Chief that an author has failed to abide by these guidelines, JARO will refuse to publish any manuscript involving that author until the matter is corrected.

  

All reviewers and editors are asked to agree to maintain confidentiality. In the event of accusations of ethical violations, the journal reserves the right to share unpublished material as needed to evaluate the accusations.

 

Authors should submit studies that have not been submitted or published elsewhere (except for preprint servers; see section above). Any re-representation of published data must be fully acknowledged and done with the approval of the copyright holder. Authors are expected to openly declare any commercial interest, or other conflict of interest, when they submit their paper for consideration. This should be done in a letter accompanying the manuscript. All authors must have agreed to the submission of the final submitted manuscript. Individual email addresses must be provided for all authors so that they may all be contacted should any problem arise.

Note that JARO now uses iThenticate to automatically screen manuscripts prior to entering into peer review. This screening compares submitted manuscripts against published manuscripts and the web. Manuscripts that appear to have plagiarized passages or significant "text reuse" are carefully examined. Such manuscripts are likely to be sent back to the authors without review.