Table of Contents

• Aims and Scope
• Open Access
• Editorial Office
• Ethical Considerations
• Submission procedures for peer review
• Manuscript categories
• Manuscript preparation

Aims and Scope

Gynecologic Robotic Surgery (GRS) is an international clinical journal providing the latest knowledge and techniques in gynecologic robotic surgery. The journal is published on the 25th day of March and September. The journal presents the editorials, up-to-date research papers, review articles, case studies, commentaries, randomized trials, innovative newer surgical tips, and letter to editor on the latest surgical robotic procedures or outcome studies in robotic gynecologic surgery and related basic sciences. The peer-reviewed proceedings of scientific meetings, symposia and workshops related to robotic surgery are also published. The journal provides a centralized, focused resource for gynecologic surgeons wishing to report and publish or those wishing to discover the most up-to-date performances.

Open Access

Gynecologic Robotic Surgery (GRS) is an open access journal. Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Permission must be requested from the Editorial Office of SKRGS to use tables or figures appearing in the journal in other periodicals, books, or media for scholarly and educational purpose. This procedure is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access.

The journal also follows the open access policy of PubMed Central at United States National Library of Medicine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/).
All contents of the journal are available immediately upon publication without embargo period. It is primarily for obstetricians & gynecologists. They will be able to obtain tailored information to adopt the information for their patients care. Its readership can be expanded to other positions: Researchers can get the cases for research projects and rationale of their researches; Clinicians in the other fields can get the recent progress of obstetrics and gynecology so that they can refer their patients for more specific consultation to obstetricians & gynecologists. Administrators of the hospital or health center can access recent info and adopt a variety of data in the management of the institutes. Medical health students can understand the recent innovation and trends of obstetrics and gynecology so that they are able to learn those information during their study. Policy makers may be able to reflect the results of the articles to the health policies especially for maternal health. The public will be able to read the advancement in the obstetrics and gynecology fields that they have a confidence in visiting obstetricians & gynecologists to consult their health problem.

Editorial Office

Society of Korean Robotic Gynecologic Surgery
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, The Catholic University of Korea Seoul St. Mary's Hospital 9F, 222 Banpo-daero, Seocho-Gu, Seoul 06591, Korea
Tel: +82-53-258-4847
Fax: +82-53-258-4848
E-mail: grsjournal.office@gmail.com

Ethical Considerations

Research Ethics

All of the manuscripts should be prepared based on strict observation of research and publication ethics guidelines recommended by the Council of Science Editors (http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE, http://www.icmje.org/), and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME, http://www.wame.org/). All studies involving human subjects or human data must be reviewed and approved by a responsible Institutional Review Board (IRB). Please refer to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethicalprinciples-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/) for all investigations involving human materials. Animal experiments also should be reviewed by an appropriate committee (IACUC, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) for the care and use of animals. Also studies with pathogens requiring a high degree of biosafety should pass review of a relevant committee (IBC). The approval should be described in the Methods section. For studies of humans including case reports, state whether informed consents were obtained from the study participants. The editor of GRS may request submission of copies of informed consents from human subjects in clinical studies or IRB approval documents. The GRS will follow the guidelines by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, http://publicationethics.org/) for settlement of any misconduct.

Conflict of Interest

The corresponding author of an article is asked to inform the Editor of the authors' potential conflicts of interest possibly influencing the research or interpretation of data. A potential conflict of interest should be disclosed in the cover letter even when the authors are confident that their judgments have not been influenced in preparing the manuscript. Such conflicts may include financial support or private connections to pharmaceutical companies, political pressure from interest groups, or academic problems. Disclosure form shall be same with ICMJE Uniform Disclosure Form for Potential Conflicts of Interest (http://www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf). The Editor will decide whether the information on the conflict should be included in the published paper. In particular, all sources of funding for a study should be explicitly stated. The GRS asks referees to let its Editor know of any conflict of interest before reviewing a particular manuscript.

Statement of Informed Consent
Copies of written informed consent and institutional review board (IRB) approval for clinical research should be retained for reference as necessary. Please insert a sentence in the Materials and Methods section stating that the study was approved or exempt from approval and include the name of the IRB.

Statement of Human and Animal Rights
All human investigations must be conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. All studies involving animals must state that guidelines of the authors’ institution, or any applicable national law, regarding the use and care of laboratory animals were followed.

Selection and Description of Participants
Clearly describe the selection of observational or experimental participants (healthy individuals or patients, including controls), including eligibility and exclusion criteria and a description of the source population. Because the relevance of such variables as age, sex, or ethnicity is not always known at the time of study design, researchers should aim for inclusion of representative populations into all study types and at a minimum provide descriptive data for these and other relevant demographic variables. Ensure correct use of the terms sex (when reporting biological factors) and gender (identity, psychosocial or cultural factors), and, unless inappropriate, report the sex and/or gender of study participants, the sex of animals or cells, and describe the methods used to determine sex and gender. If the study was done involving an exclusive population, for example in only one sex, authors should justify why, except in obvious cases, (e.g., prostate cancer).” Authors should define how they determined race or ethnicity and justify their relevance.

Originality and Duplicate Publication
All submitted manuscripts should be original; further, they should not be under consideration for publication by other scientific journals. Any part of the accepted manuscript may not be duplicated in any other scientific journal without the permission of the editorial board. If duplicate publication related to a paper in this journal is detected, the author(s) will be named in the journal, and the respective institute(s) of affiliation will be informed; additionally, there will be penalties for the author(s).

Registration of Clinical Trial Research
It is recommended that research dealing with a clinical trial be registered with a primary national clinical trial registration site such as https://cris.nih.go.kr/cris, or other sites accredited by the World Health Organization (WHO) or the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

Copyright and Licensing
All published papers become the permanent property of the Society of Korean Robotic Gynecologic Surgery. A copyright transfer form should be submitted to the editorial office by fax, regular mail, or e-mail upon acceptance. If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. It is the responsibility of the author(s) to request permission from the publisher for any material that is being reproduced. This requirement applies to text, illustrations, and tables.
Gynecologic Robotic Surgery (GRS) is an open access journal. Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Permission must be requested from the Editorial Office of GRS to use tables or figures appearing in the journal in other periodicals, books, or media for scholarly and educational purpose. This procedure is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access.
The journal also follows the open access policy of PubMed Central at United States National Library of Medicine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/).
All contents of the journal are available immediately upon publication without embargo period.

Submission procedures for peer review

Manuscripts Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at (http://submit.grsjournal.org/). Submission instructions are available on the website. All articles submitted to the journal must comply with these instructions. Failure to do so will result in return of the manuscript and a possible delay in publication.

Screening before Review

If the manuscript does not fit the aims and scope of the journal or does not adhere to the Instructions to Authors, it may be returned to the author immediately after receipt and without a review. Before reviewing, all submitted manuscripts are inspected by Similarity Check powered by iThenticate (https://www.crossref.org/services/similarity-check/), a plagiarism-screening tool. If the similarity score is too high, the editorial board will conduct a more profound content screening. If the similarity rate is 15% or more, further screening is usually performed; furthermore, every manuscript may be checked for excessive similarity in specific sentences. The settings for Similarity Check screening are such that the following are excluded: quotes, bibliography, small matches (e.g., six words), small sources (1%), and the Methods section.

Peer Review Process

The editor selects peer referees by recommendation of the editorial board members or from the specialist database owned by the editorial board. Acceptance of the manuscript is decided based on the quality and originality of research and its clinical and scientific significance by the referees. This journal uses a double blind review, which means that identities of both the reviewer and author are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. A referee’s decision is given as “accept,” “minor revision,” “major revision,” and “reject.” If there is a marked discrepancy in the decisions between two referees or in opinions between the author and referee(s), the editor may send the manuscript to another referee for additional comments and a recommended decision. An initial decision will normally be made within four weeks of receipt of a manuscript, and the reviewers' comments will be sent to the corresponding authors by e-mail. Revised manuscripts must be submitted online by the corresponding author, who must indicate the alterations that have been made in response to the referees' comments item by item. Failure to resubmit the revised manuscript within eight weeks of the editorial decision is regarded as a withdrawal.

Article Processing Charges

There is no page charge for submission or publication.

Manuscript categories

The journal focuses on clinical and experimental studies, reviews, case reports, and short communications. Any physician or researcher throughout the world can submit a manuscript if the scope of the manuscript is appropriate. However, manuscripts should be submitted in English.

Original articles

Original articles are reports of basic or clinical investigations. The maximum length of a manuscript is 3,500 words of body text, excluding the abstract, references, figures, and tables. These articles are limited to 40 references. The manuscript should be organized in the following sequence: title page, the abstract and keywords, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, acknowledgments, references, tables, and figures with their legends.

Reviews

Reviews are invited by the editor and should be comprehensive analyses of specific topics. Authors who wish to submit unsolicited reviews should contact the editor-in-chief to determine appropriateness of reviews for publication in GRS. These articles are organized as follows: title page, the abstract and keywords, introduction, body text, conclusion, acknowledgments, references, tables, and figures with their legends. The maximum word count is 4,500 words of body text, excluding the abstract, references, tables, and figures. The editors also suggest a limit of 150 references.

Case reports

Case reports will be published only in exceptional circumstances (i.e., when they illustrate rare occurrences of clinical importance). Up to three cases may be described, and case reports should be organized in the following sequence: title page, the abstract and keywords, introduction, case report, discussion, acknowledgments, references, tables, and figures with their legends. The abstract should be unstructured, and its length should not exceed 150 words. The manuscript should not exceed 1,500 words; further, no more than two figures (including tables) should be included, and the number of references is limited to 15.

Short communications

A short communication is a definitive report of highly significant findings in the field; it receives a very rapid review and, if accepted, is published within an average of 12 weeks from receipt. A manuscript should not exceed 1,500 words and must contain an unstructured abstract of approximately 150 words, a oneparagraph introduction, an abbreviated materials and methods section, a results section, and a concise discussion section. There should be no more than 20 references and no more than two tables (including figures).

Letter to the Editor

A letter to the editor provides brief comments in response to a specific published article in GRS. A letter addressing an article published in one of the three previous issues will be considered. The editor-in chief may invite the author(s) of the published article to reply in writing. A published letter is accompanied by either a reply from the original author(s) or the statement, “Reply declined.” A letter must include a title page (including your affiliation, full address, and e-mail address), conflict of interest disclosure, and a Statement of Authorship signed by all authors. A letter can be signed by no more than four authors and must not exceed 1,000 words (excluding references); only one table or figure may be included (if essential). Additionally, no more than five references are allowed. Letters to the editor should deal with short clinical cases of medical interest or innovation. All letters should be recommended by the journal’s editors. Please do not upload your case report as a letter on the submission website. No abstract or keywords are required, and text should be formatted in one continuous section.

Manuscript preparation

Manuscripts for submission to GRS should be prepared according to the following instructions. The journal follows the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication” (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/), commonly known as “the Vancouver style,” if not otherwise described below.

General Guidelines

After entering information about the authors, the manuscript title, abstract, keywords, and other details, you will be prompted to upload your files. The main document with manuscript text and tables should be prepared with in Microsoft Word. The main document should be organized in the following order: title page, the abstract and keywords, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, acknowledgments, references, tables, and figures with their legends. The manuscript should be written in 10-point font with double spacing on A4-sized paper (21.0×29.7 cm) with 2.5 cm margins (top, bottom, right, and left). Manuscript pages are to be numbered consecutively, centered at the bottom of each page and beginning without the title page as page 1. The use of acronyms and abbreviations is discouraged and should be kept to a minimum. Acronyms and abbreviations cannot be used in the title. When used, they are to be defined where first used, followed by the acronym or abbreviation in parentheses. Drug and chemical names should be stated in standard chemical or generic nomenclature. Units of measure should be presented according to the International System (SI) of units.

Title Page
Include the following items on the title page: title of the article, full names of authors, and institutional affiliations of all authors. A short running head must also be provided, consisting of fewer than 40 characters including spaces. When addresses of authors differ, begin with the name of the organization where the primary research was conducted and follow with the names of the other organizations along with the authors’ names, listed in numerical order. At the bottom of the title page, identify the corresponding author and include his/her postal address and e-mail address.

Abstract and Keywords
The abstract should not exceed 250 words and describe concisely, in a paragraph, the following: Objective, Methods, Results, and Conclusion. Up to five keywords should be listed below the abstract as index terms. For the selection of keywords, refer to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh) in Medline.

Introduction
Briefly describe the purpose of the investigation, including relevant background information.

Materials and Methods
Describe the research plan, materials (or subjects), and methods used, in that order. Explain in detail how the disease was confirmed and how subjectivity in observations was controlled. When experimental methodology is the main issue of the paper, describe the process in detail so as to recreate the experiment as closely as possible. The sources of the apparatus or reagents used should be given along with the source location (name of company, city, state, and country). Information regarding institutional review board/ethics committee approval or waiver and informed consent should be stated. Methodology for statistical analyses and criteria for statistical significance should be described.

Results
Results should be presented in a logical sequence in the text, tables/figures, and illustrations. Do not repeat in the text all data that appear in the tables or figures; you may, however, describe important points and trends.

Discussion
Observations pertaining to the results of research and other related materials should be interpreted for your readers. Emphasize new and important observations; do not merely repeat the contents of the introduction or results. Explain the meaning of observed opinions along with their limits; within the limits of the research results, connect the conclusion to the purpose of the research.

Acknowledgments
If necessary, persons who have made substantial contributions but who have not met the criteria for authorship are acknowledged here. All sources of funding applicable to the study, disclosure of potential conflicts of interest (including financial interests, activities, relationships, and affiliations), information on previous presentations, and any important disclaimers should be stated explicitly here.

Ethical Approval
Clinical studies or experiments using laboratory animals or pathogens should mention approval of the studies by relevant committees in this section. The sources of special chemicals or preparations should be given along with their location (name of company, city and state, and country). Method of statistical analyses and the criteria for determining significance levels should be described. An ethics statement should be placed here when the studies are performed using clinical samples or data, and animals.

Patient Consent
All authors are required to follow the ICMJE requirements (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-andresponsibilities/protection-of-research-participants.html) on privacy and informed consent from patients and study participants. Confirm that any patient, service user, or participant in any research, experiment, or clinical trial described in the paper has given written consent to the inclusion of material pertaining to themselves; and that authors have fully anonymized them.

References
In the text, references should be cited with Arabic numerals in brackets in the order cited. In the References section, the references should be numbered in order of appearance in the text (in English). List all authors if there are less than or equal to six authors. List the first six authors followed by “et al.” if there are more than six authors. If an article has been published online but has not yet been given an issue or pages, the digital object identifier (DOI) should be supplied. Journal titles should be abbreviated in the style used in Medline. If the reference is in Korean, then provide the English version in the references list. Other types of references not described below should follow Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/citingmedicine).

• Journal articles:
1. Park JH, Chung D, Cho HY, Kim YH, Son GH, Park YW, et al. Random urine protein/creatinine ratio readily predicts proteinuria in preeclampsia. Obstet Gynecol Sci 2013;56:8-14.
2. Reed SD, Newton KM, Garcia RL, Allison KH, Voigt LF, Jordan CD, et al. Complex hyperplasia with and without atypia: clinical outcomes and implications of progestin therapy. Obstet Gynecol 2010;116:365-73.

• Entire book:
3. Korean Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Gynecology. 4th ed. Seoul: Korean Medical Book Publisher; 2007.

• Part of a book:
4. Holschneider CH, Berek JS. Valvar cancer. In: Berek JS, Novak E, editors. Berek & Novak’s gynecology. 14th ed. Philadelphia (PA): Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2007. p.1549-80.

• Conference paper:
5. Rice AS, Brooks JW. Canabinoids and pain. In: Dostorovsky JO, Carr DB, editors. Proceedings of the 10th World Congress on Pain; 2002 Aug 17-22; San Diego, CA. Seattle (WA): IASP Press; 2003. p.437-68.

• Online publication:
6. Dieci MV, Barbieri E, Piacentini F, Ficarra G, Bettelli S, Dominici M, et al. Discordance in receptor status between primary and recurrent breast cancer has a prognostic impact: a single-Institution analysis. Ann Oncol 2012 Sep 20 [Epub]. https://doi.org/10.1093/annonc/mds248.

• Online sources:
7. American Cancer Society. Cancer reference information [Internet]. Atlanta (GA): American Cancer Society; c2012 [cited 2012 Oct 20]. Available from: http://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/CRI_0.asp.
8. National Cancer Information Center. Cancer incidence [Internet]. Goyang (KR): National Cancer Information Center; c2012 [cited 2012 Oct 20]. Available from: http://www.cancer.go.kr/cms/statics.

Tables
Each table should have a title, begin on a new page, and be numbered with an Arabic numeral in the order in which it is cited in the text.
The title and contents of a table should be written in concise and clear English so that the reader can understand the table without referring to the text. The total number of tables shall not exceed five. Within a table, if a non-standard abbreviation or description is necessary, elaborate with an annotation below the table. Insert lower case, superscript letters a), b), c), etc., to the right of terms that need explanation. The annotation (preceded by the respective lower case letter) should appear below the table. Statistical measures, such as SD or SEM, should be identified. Vertical or horizontal lines between entries should be omitted.

Figures
Upload each figure as a separate image file.
The figure images should be provided in EPS or TIF format—although the JPEG format is allowed for color figures—in high resolution (preferably 300 dpi for figures and 600 dpi for line art and graphs). If figures are not original, the author(s) must contact each publisher to request permission to reprint; include information regarding permission to reprint in a footnote below the figure. Figures should be numbered, using Arabic numerals, in the order in which they are cited in the text. In the case of multiple images within the same figure, use capital letters after the numeral to indicate the correct order (e.g., Fig. 1A, Fig. 1B). The total number of figures shall not exceed five. A figure legend should be a one-sentence description (rather than a phrase or a paragraph) in English.