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Albanian Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery
About

About the Journal

The Albanian Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery (AJTES) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to high-quality scientific work in trauma, emergency, and acute care medicine and surgery. AJTES is the official scientific publication of the Albanian Society for Trauma and Emergency Surgery (ASTES). The journal has been published continuously since 2017 and appears twice a year, in English.

Why this journal exists

Injury is one of the leading causes of death and disability among working-age adults in Albania and across the Western Balkans, yet the region’s trauma and emergency care generates far less published evidence than its clinical burden warrants. Case series from regional trauma centres, data on prehospital and emergency systems, and studies of acute surgical practice in resource-constrained settings have historically had few places to appear: international journals often judge the sample sizes and settings to be of limited general interest, while the region’s own literature has been fragmented, largely non-indexed, and mostly published in languages with little international reach.

AJTES was founded to close that gap. The journal exists to give trauma and emergency clinicians in Albania, the Western Balkans, and comparable health systems a rigorous, international, English-language venue for their work — and to make that work visible and citable beyond the region. Its purpose is not only to publish but to raise standards: to hold regional research to the same methodological and ethical requirements as any indexed international journal, and by doing so to strengthen the evidence base on which trauma care in these systems is built.

The journal is deliberately positioned at the intersection of three concerns: trauma and emergency surgery as a clinical discipline; emergency and trauma systems, including prehospital care, triage, transfer, and disaster preparedness in countries where those systems are still developing; and the transfer of evidence between well-resourced and resource-constrained settings, in both directions. Work from low- and middle-income settings is not treated as a lesser category here — it is the reason the journal exists.

On this page: Why this journal exists · Aims · Scope · Article Types · Peer Review · Publication Ethics · Open Access & Licensing · Archiving · Revenue & Advertising · Journal Information · Indexing · Direct Marketing · The journal in numbers · Ownership & Contact · Mission

Aims

  • Publish original, rigorously peer-reviewed research in accordance with internationally recognised standards of scientific integrity, transparency, and publication ethics (COPE, ICMJE, WAME, CSE).
  • Advance evidence-based clinical practice, innovation, and multidisciplinary collaboration in trauma and emergency care.
  • Promote the integration of clinical medicine, surgery, nursing care, pharmaceutical services, and allied health sciences in the care of injured and acutely ill patients.
  • Support the continuous professional development of surgeons, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other healthcare professionals.
  • Encourage student research, early-career clinician engagement, and the academic development of young physicians, on subjects within the journal’s scope.
  • Contribute to better patient safety, quality of care, and healthcare system performance at national and international level.

Scope

AJTES publishes scholarly work across a broad, multidisciplinary spectrum, including but not limited to:

  • Trauma surgery and polytrauma
  • Orthopaedic and musculoskeletal trauma
  • Emergency general and acute care surgery
  • Plastic and reconstructive surgery, burns and wounds
  • Anaesthesia, intensive care and perioperative medicine
  • Surgical infection and antimicrobial stewardship
  • Prehospital care, disaster and military medicine
  • Trauma systems, injury prevention and health policy
  • Nursing, rehabilitation and allied health
  • Pharmacy and pharmacotherapy in acute care
  • Surgical techniques, technology and innovation
  • Education, training and simulation
  • Basic science and translational research

What is outside our scope. AJTES considers work only where trauma, emergency, acute care, or critical care is the substantive subject of the study. The following fall outside the journal’s scope and are declined without external review, however sound the work may be:

  • Elective and scheduled surgery — planned procedures in stable patients, including elective cardiac surgery (valve replacement, coronary artery bypass, repair of congenital defects), elective vascular access such as arteriovenous fistula formation, elective hernia and gallbladder surgery, and cosmetic or reconstructive procedures not arising from injury.
  • Dentistry and oral health — caries, endodontics, periodontal disease, orthodontics, and routine oral surgery. Maxillofacial trauma is in scope; dental practice is not.
  • Chronic disease management — the long-term care of conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, chronic kidney or liver disease, and non-acute oncology, including screening, staging, and survivorship, unless the study addresses their acute or emergency presentation.
  • Primary care and general outpatient practice, and public-health or health-policy work unconnected to emergency or trauma systems.
  • Basic and laboratory science with no stated application to trauma or acute care.
  • Education and health-services research that is not about trauma or emergency care — for example, the learning environment of health-professions students, workforce satisfaction, or curriculum evaluation in unrelated specialties. Training and simulation in trauma and emergency care remain in scope.

Two points follow from this. A manuscript is judged on its subject matter, not its authors: authorship by students or trainees does not by itself bring a topic within scope, and neither does an author’s affiliation with a trauma centre. And a passing reference to injury or urgency in the introduction does not make an otherwise elective or chronic-disease study an emergency one — the acute-care question must be what the study actually investigates.

Authors unsure whether a topic fits are welcome to send a pre-submission enquiry with the title and abstract to the Editorial Office before preparing a full manuscript.

Article Types

AJTES publishes Research Articles, Review Articles, Case Reports, Short Reports, Commentaries, Perspective Articles, Opinion Articles, Letters to the Editor, News and Updates, and conference content (Congress Proceedings and Conference Papers).

The definition of each type, what the editors look for, the applicable word, abstract, reference, and figure limits, and whether the type is externally peer reviewed, are set out on the journal’s Article Types page.

Publication of a conference or meeting abstract in a proceedings issue does not preclude later submission of the full paper: authors are welcome to submit the complete study to a regular issue, where it undergoes the journal’s normal double-anonymised peer review, with the earlier abstract disclosed at submission.

Peer-Review Process

AJTES operates an independent, double-anonymised (double-blind) peer-review system. Every submission is screened editorially for scope, ethical documentation, and language, and is checked for textual similarity with iThenticate (Crossref Similarity Check) before it is sent to reviewers.

What is peer reviewed. All Research Articles, Review Articles, Case Reports, Short Reports, and Conference Papers are sent for external review by at least two independent reviewers, with a statistical reviewer added where appropriate. Commentaries, Perspective Articles, Opinion Articles, Letters to the Editor, and News and Updates are assessed by the Editor-in-Chief or a member of the Editorial Board, and sent for external review where the editors judge it appropriate. Abstracts published in Congress Proceedings supplements are screened editorially and are not externally peer reviewed.

Initial assessment normally takes two weeks and external review a further four to eight weeks. Time spent by authors on revision is not counted in those periods, and revised manuscripts undergo a further round of evaluation, so the overall time from submission to a final decision is commonly two to four months. The journal does not compress or bypass peer review to achieve faster acceptance.

→ The full peer-review policy, including confidentiality, conflicts of interest, and the appeals procedure, is published at Peer Review Process. Reviewers should read Information for Reviewers.

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

The journal applies the following named standards in full, and editors are required to consult them when handling ethical concerns:

Duties of authors

  • Originality and plagiarism: submitted manuscripts must be the authors’ own work, with proper acknowledgement of the work of others. Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable.
  • Redundant or concurrent publication: manuscripts must not be under consideration by another journal, and must not have been published in a peer-reviewed journal — other than as an abstract, thesis, conference presentation, or preprint, each of which must be disclosed at submission with a citation and, where one exists, a DOI.
  • Authorship: limited to individuals who made a significant contribution to conception, design, execution, or interpretation, in accordance with ICMJE criteria.
  • Data integrity: the work must be reported accurately and in enough detail to permit replication. Fabrication, falsification, or selective reporting is unacceptable.
  • Conflicts of interest: all authors must disclose financial and non-financial conflicts of interest.
  • Ethical approval and consent: research involving human participants or animals must state approval by an appropriate ethics committee and adherence to the Declaration of Helsinki and relevant guidelines; informed consent must be obtained, and identifiable patient information may not be published without explicit consent.
  • Corrections: authors must promptly notify the journal of errors and cooperate in correcting or retracting the article.

Duties of editors

  • Decisions are based on scientific merit, originality, clarity, and relevance to the journal’s scope.
  • Manuscripts are evaluated without regard to the authors’ race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy.
  • Information about a submitted manuscript is disclosed only to the corresponding author, reviewers, and editorial advisors.
  • Editors recuse themselves from manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest, and act on ethical concerns following the COPE flowchart applicable to the concern raised.
  • Submissions by editors and board members. Manuscripts authored or co-authored by the Editor-in-Chief, an editor, or a member of the Editorial Board are submitted through the normal system and handled in full by an independent editor with no recent collaboration with the authors. The submitting editor has no access to reviewer identities, reviewer reports, or the decision record at any stage, and takes no part in the decision. Articles published under this procedure state which editor handled them. The proportion of content authored by editors and Board members is monitored by the Chair of the Editorial Board.

Duties of reviewers

  • Assist editors in decision-making and help authors improve their manuscripts through objective, constructive, evidence-based feedback.
  • Treat all manuscripts as confidential documents.
  • Identify relevant published work not cited by the authors and report substantial similarity with other works.
  • Decline to review manuscripts where competing interests exist.

Publisher responsibilities

The publisher supports editorial independence, ensures that commercial interests do not influence editorial decisions, and maintains transparency throughout the publication process.

Misconduct, corrections, and retractions

Suspected or confirmed misconduct — plagiarism, data or image fabrication, redundant publication, authorship abuse, undisclosed conflicts, research without valid approval or consent, manipulation of peer review, or citation manipulation — is handled under the applicable COPE flowchart. Concerns may be raised by anyone, are acknowledged within five working days, and are assessed on their evidence whether or not the person raising them identifies themselves. The corresponding author is given the allegation with its evidence and 21 days to respond before any finding is made.

Where the published record must be corrected, AJTES publishes a correction, an expression of concern, or a retraction. Every notice is free to read, carries its own DOI, and is linked in both directions to the article, which remains available. Amendments that cannot bear on how an article is read or credited — a typographical error, a broken link — are published instead as a new version of the article, with the full version history shown on the article page. Articles are not silently amended.

→ Full procedure: Research Integrity, Corrections and Retractions.

Artificial intelligence

AI tools cannot be listed as authors, and authors remain fully responsible for all content including anything produced with AI assistance. Use of generative AI must be disclosed; generating data, images, or references with AI is prohibited. Reviewers and editors must not upload manuscripts to external AI tools. → Full policy: Artificial Intelligence Policy.

Data sharing and reproducibility

A Data Availability statement is mandatory in every research article. It must state where the data underlying the findings are held, how they may be accessed, and, where access is restricted, the specific reason. Authors are strongly encouraged to deposit anonymised datasets in a recognised repository and to cite the dataset with its DOI. For clinical trials, a data-sharing statement meeting the ICMJE requirement must be included. Statements such as “data are available on request” without a named contact and a stated mechanism are not accepted.

Post-publication discussion

Scholarly debate does not end at publication. Readers may comment on or challenge a published article by submitting a Letter to the Editor citing the article’s DOI. Substantive letters are sent to the original authors for a response, and letter and reply are normally published together, each with its own DOI and linked to the original article. Anonymous commentary is not published. Concerns about the integrity of an article, rather than its interpretation, are handled under the misconduct and corrections procedures above.

Appeals and complaints

The full appeals and complaints procedure, including timeframes and the safeguards that apply when the original decision was taken by the Editor-in-Chief, is set out on the Peer Review Process page.

Open Access, Copyright, and Licensing

AJTES is a fully open-access journal: all articles are freely and permanently available online immediately upon publication, with no subscription charges or registration barriers.

Copyright for all articles is retained by the author(s). By publishing in AJTES, authors grant the journal a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual licence to publish, reproduce, distribute, and archive the article as the Version of Record and to be identified as its original publisher.

Articles published from 1 November 2026 are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits copying, redistribution, and adaptation of the material for any purpose, including commercially, provided appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and source, a link to the licence is provided, and any changes are indicated. Articles published before 1 November 2026 keep the licence they were published under, shown on each article’s page: CC BY-NC 4.0, or CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 for Volume 10, Issue 2 (2026).

Where authors are legally prevented from retaining copyright (for example, government employees or Crown copyright holders), an alternative copyright statement can be applied and will be clearly indicated in the published article; such cases must be raised with the Editorial Office at submission. The published article is the definitive Version of Record, and its licensing and attribution information remain permanently associated with it.

Archiving and Preservation

AJTES is committed to the long-term preservation of its published record. The following measures are in place:

  • Persistent identifiers. Every research article is registered with Crossref and assigned a DOI, and abstracts in conference supplements are assigned DOIs where the meeting organiser supplies the required metadata, so published work remains citable and resolvable independently of the journal’s own web address. Article metadata deposited with Crossref is retained permanently by that agency.
  • Permanent open availability. All issues from 2017 onward remain freely accessible on this website, with no embargo, paywall, or removal of back content. Where the record must be corrected, this is done through published corrections, retractions, or expressions of concern, leaving the original citable; minor amendments that cannot affect interpretation are published as a new version, with earlier versions kept accessible. An article file is withdrawn only where the content is defamatory, infringes legal rights, breaches patient confidentiality, or where the journal is legally compelled, and the citation, DOI, and reason remain permanently in its place.
  • Metadata harvesting. The journal exposes an OAI-PMH interface, allowing DOAJ, indexing services, aggregators, and library discovery systems to harvest and retain article metadata independently.
  • Distributed copies. Authors are permitted — and encouraged — to deposit the published Version of Record in institutional and subject repositories immediately upon publication, without embargo, under the licence the article carries. This places durable copies outside the journal’s own infrastructure.
  • Backups. The journal’s full database and file archive are backed up on a regular schedule and retained by the publisher.

Third-party dark archiving. The PKP Preservation Network — a LOCKSS-based dark archive operated by the Public Knowledge Project — does not yet support OJS 3.5, the platform version on which this journal runs. The journal will enrol as soon as support for OJS 3.5 is released, adding an independent preservation copy held outside the publisher’s own infrastructure. Until then, the measures above are the preservation arrangements in force, and this statement will be updated when enrolment is complete.

Revenue Sources and Advertising

The journal is funded by Article Processing Charges (EUR 200, or EUR 150 for members of ASTES, taxes excluded, charged only after acceptance) and by the support of its publisher, the Albanian Society for Trauma and Emergency Surgery (ASTES). AJTES does not accept commercial advertising, on the website or in published issues, and does not offer paid fast-track services. Editorial decisions are made solely on scholarly merit and are never influenced by any source of revenue; the ability to pay the APC plays no role in acceptance.

Journal Information

  • Publication frequency: two issues per year
  • Language: English
  • Peer review: double-blind
  • ISSN: 2521-8778 (print) · 2616-4922 (online)
  • DOI registration: Crossref, prefix 10.32391
  • Article Processing Charge: EUR 200; EUR 150 for members of the Albanian Society for Trauma and Emergency Surgery (ASTES); taxes excluded (VAT or other taxes are added where applicable) — charged only after acceptance, against an invoice. There is no submission fee. See Fees and Payment.

Indexing, abstracting and registration

Indexed and abstracted in: the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Registration and identifier services (these are not indexing services): Crossref, which registers and resolves the journal’s DOIs; and the ISSN International Centre, through which the journal is listed in ROAD, the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources.

Discoverability: published articles are indexed by Google Scholar and can be harvested by library discovery systems through the journal’s OAI-PMH interface.

AJTES lists only services with which it holds a registration or an agreement. It does not display or endorse unofficial impact metrics, and does not quote impact factors it has not been awarded. Articles may also be found through general aggregators and author-upload platforms; those are not listed as indexing, because their coverage is neither guaranteed nor verifiable.

Direct Marketing

AJTES does not purchase, rent, or use third-party mailing lists, and does not send unsolicited bulk invitations to submit manuscripts, to join the Editorial Board, or to guest-edit issues.

Direct communication from the journal is limited to correspondence with authors, reviewers, and editors about specific submissions; messages to people who have registered an account on this website; and announcements of new issues to registered readers. Every such message identifies AJTES and its publisher and includes a working unsubscribe mechanism. Information used in any communication about the journal — scope, indexing status, review times, editorial board, and fees — is factual and verifiable on this website. AJTES engages no agents or third parties to solicit submissions on its behalf; any email soliciting submissions for AJTES from an address outside the journal’s own domain should be reported to the Editorial Office.

The journal in numbers

Figures below describe the journal’s published record and editorial operations as at July 2026, and are drawn from its own editorial system.

  • AJTES has been published continuously since 2017, twice a year, with no interruption to the publishing schedule.
  • Published work has come from authors in 39 countries, and 31% of authors on published articles are affiliated outside Albania — principally North Macedonia, Türkiye, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Germany, Greece, Italy, the United States, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Qatar.
  • The Editorial Board comprises 44 editors and Board members working in 15 countries — the Editorial Board Chair, the Editor-in-Chief, five Deputy Editors, a 16-member International Editorial Board, an 18-member National Editorial Board, and three Advisory Editors — supported by four Assistant Editors, who do not take editorial decisions. The International Editorial Board is drawn from the United States, Italy, Norway, Germany, Estonia, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Türkiye, Romania, Israel, Ireland, North Macedonia, and Kosovo.
  • Peer review is carried out by an actively maintained reviewer pool: 432 reviews were completed between 2022 and mid-2026 by 195 individual reviewers.

These figures describe the journal’s composition and reach, and are reviewed once a year. Counts of published articles are not reproduced here, because they change with every issue; the complete published record is in the Archive, which is always current. The Editorial Board was last reviewed in July 2026.

Ownership, management and contact

AJTES is owned and published by the Albanian Society for Trauma and Emergency Surgery (ASTES), a non-profit scientific society registered in Albania. The journal has no commercial owner. Editorial appointments are made by the ASTES executive board on the recommendation of the Editor-in-Chief, on the basis of scholarly standing; the current Editorial Board, with full affiliations, is published on the Editorial Board page.

Editorial Office
Albanian Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery
Street “Lord Bajron” No. 40, 1000 Tirana, Albania
Email: editorial@journal.astes.org.al

Use this address for pre-submission enquiries, invoices and payments, appeals and complaints, authorship changes, corrections, and research-integrity concerns.

Mission

AJTES exists to make the trauma and emergency care practised in Albania, the Western Balkans, and comparable health systems visible, rigorous, and citable in the international literature — and to bring international evidence back to the clinicians who work in those systems.

To that end the journal commits to:

  • Publish regional evidence to international standards. Hold work from developing trauma systems to the same methodological, ethical, and reporting requirements as any indexed journal, rather than applying a lower standard because of where the research was done.
  • Serve the whole trauma pathway. Prehospital care, resuscitation, operative management, critical care, rehabilitation, and the systems that connect them — including disaster and mass-casualty preparedness in countries where such planning is still being built.
  • Build regional research capacity. Give constructive, developmental peer review to early-career clinicians and first-time authors, so that a review is an education rather than only a verdict.
  • Keep the evidence free at the point of use. Full open access without embargo, because the clinicians who most need this literature frequently work in institutions that cannot pay for it.
  • Connect the region to the field. Maintain an international editorial board and reviewer pool so that regional work is assessed by, and reaches, the wider trauma and emergency surgery community.

Progress against these commitments is measured by the record set out above: continuous publication, a widening international authorship, and an editorial process whose timelines and outcomes the journal publishes rather than asserts.

Version 1.0, approved by the Editorial Board on 27 July 2026. Reviewed at least every two years.