About the Journal

Focus and Scope

Acta Radiológica Portuguesa (ARP) was founded in 1989 as the official publication of the Portuguese Society of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine (SPRMN). It has recognized value in the national scientific scene.

It is an open-access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal that continuously publishes scientific contributions related to the basic and clinical aspects of modern Radiology, including diagnostic imaging and interventional techniques, nuclear medicine, radiobiology, and radiological physics. It is aimed at the entire clinical and scientific community with an interest in Radiology, but with greater emphasis on its clinical application.

Submitted articles must be original and cannot have been previously published, except for preprints and institutional repositories. The accuracy of the contents, as well as the opinions expressed, are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Articles published in ARP may be reproduced in a non-commercial context in accordance with CC BY-NC 4.0 standards, maintaining credit to the authors and a link to the publication via DOI. After publication in ARP, authors may publish articles in public or institutional repositories, always mentioning the prior publication in ARP.

 

Peer Review Process

ARP follows a rigorous double-blind peer review process.

All manuscripts first undergo evaluation by the Editor-in-Chief, who may reject them without recourse to the reviewers' opinion (desk rejection). Works that do not conform to the journal's standards cannot be considered for publication. After the first evaluation, the Editor-in-Chief or Section Editor sends the manuscript to at least two Reviewers.

Within a maximum of 4 weeks, Reviewers must respond to the Editor-in-Chief or Section Editor indicating their comments regarding the manuscript, and their suggestion regarding the acceptance, revision, or rejection of the manuscript, according to ARP's recommendations. Within 10 days, the Editorial Team will decide: accept the article without modifications; send the Reviewers' comments so that the Authors can proceed as indicated; or reject it. In the event of conflicting recommendations from two reviewers, the editorial decision will be the responsibility of the Section Editor or the Editor-in-Chief, and in some cases, the opinion of a third reviewer may be requested to break a tie.

When changes are proposed, the authors have 20 days (a period that may be extended at the authors' request) to submit the new revised version of the manuscript, including the comments from the reviewers and the editorial board. They must answer all questions asked and submit a revised version of the article, with the inserted changes highlighted in a different color. The Editor-in-Chief has 10 days to make a decision on the new version: reject, accept, or submit it to a new review by the reviewers.

All decisions will be communicated to the Corresponding Author by email. In the proofreading phase by the authors, fundamental changes to the articles will not be accepted. The inclusion of such changes may lead to the subsequent rejection of the article by the Editor-in-Chief.

 

Editorial Freedom

It is the responsibility of SPRMN to appoint and dismiss Editors, agreeing at the time of their appointment on their rights and duties, authority, and conflict resolution mechanisms.

ARP adopts the ICMJE definition of editorial freedom, which states that the Editor-in-Chief assumes complete authority over the editorial content of the journal as a whole and over the publication of its content. SPRMN, as the owner of ARP, does not interfere in the evaluation, selection, scheduling, or editing process of any manuscript, either directly or by maintaining an environment that could strongly influence decisions. The Editor bases editorial decisions on the validity of the work and its importance to readers, and not on the commercial implications it may have for the journal, and has the freedom to express critical, but responsible, views on all aspects of medicine without fear of reprisal.

 

Informed Consent and Ethical Standards

Authors must ensure that the study that gave rise to the article they submit for publication complies with ethical and legal principles, both during the research and in the publication, namely with the recommendations of the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki and the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals – prepared by the International Committee of Medical Journals – ICMJE (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations) and the Committee on Publication Ethics - COPE (http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines).

When a paper submitted to ARP describes experiments conducted on humans, it must specify that the participants were fully informed of the nature, objectives, and procedures of the study and that informed consent was obtained from them (which must be in the authors' possession and may be requested during the article's evaluation). Approval documents from the institutional ethics committee must be in the authors' possession and may be requested, as well as informed consent for each individual present in photographs, even after attempts to conceal their identity. Any suspicion of misconduct will be investigated and reported.

 

Conflict of Interests

Authors must declare potential conflicts of interest in the author responsibility statement. In this context, authors are required to disclose any financial and personal relationships that exist in relation to the submitted work. They must also identify any benefits that may be associated with the publication of the article, including: shares or financial interests in companies or other institutions, salaries or awards, grants or other forms of funding, consultancies, patent rights, or any other types of financial relationships. Any other personal, professional, political, religious, or other relationships that readers may consider potentially influential in relation to the article being published should also be reported. This information will be kept confidential during the manuscript review and will not influence the editorial decision, but will be published with the article if it is accepted. The existence of conflicts of interest for the publication of an article does not constitute grounds for its rejection, provided that such conflicts of interest are duly declared.

 

Authorship Acceptance Criteria

Since the end of 2025, ARP uses the CRedit criteria for authorship acceptance, which can be consulted at CRedit - Taxonomia para Contribuição de Autores - PUB IN. In short, authors must have a substantial, direct intellectual contribution to the design and elaboration of the study and the respective article, to the analysis and interpretation of the data, as well as to the writing of the manuscript, critical review of the content, and approval of the final version. Authors are responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the entire work.

The specific contributions of each author should be explicitly described on the manuscript's title page and should be selected from the CRediT taxonomy.

Contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship but who contributed to the study or manuscript should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgments section, specifying their contribution.

 

When submitting an article, authors must attach:

1) A cover letter, written and signed by the corresponding author, explaining why the manuscript is of interest to ARP and should be published, affirming the article's originality, that it was only submitted to that journal and that it has not been previously published (except for preprints and institutional repositories), and that it complies with the instructions to authors; that the work conforms to ethical and legal principles; and what the funding sources are.

2) Authorship Responsibility Statement (ConfiguraçõesStatement of Authorial Responsibility), written and signed individually by each of the authors of the work, in which each must declare that they meet the authorship criteria and specify their contribution to the work; that they agree with the content of the article; if there are any conflicts of interest and what they are; and authorization for the publication of the work.

3) Declaration of Conflicts of Interest. For this, they must download the document “ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest” available at: http://www.icmje.org/conflicts-of-interest/

4) Declaration of Data Availability. Information on where the data supporting the results reported in the article can be found, including, where applicable, hyperlinks to the datasets analyzed or generated during the study. When the research data are not publicly available, this must be stated in the manuscript, along with the conditions for accessing the data.

 

Continuous Publication, with Quarterly Issues

Continuous publication was introduced at the end of 2025, and articles accepted for publication are immediately published in the "Online First" section, with the issue number and edition already scheduled for the future. Quarterly issues are then published with the articles selected in advance.

 

Language

Articles may be submitted in Portuguese or English.

Titles, abstracts, and keywords must always be presented in both languages.

 

Copyright

Authors retain unrestricted copyright to published works and related research data. ARP holds the right of reference for publication and must be cited in subsequent uses.

 

Preprints and Self-Archiving

ARP allows authors to publish their articles in preprint format in public or institutional archives and repositories prior to submission, thus not preventing peer review and eventual publication. After the article is published, the publication must be cited in ARP, with a link to the publication and its respective DOI. These conditions can be found at: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/40037

 

Research Data

ARP follows the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles for the qualification of research data repositories, and its availability is recommended, in order to facilitate the replicability of research, also increasing the visibility and impact of published works. For this purpose, the Repositório de Dados de Investigação | POLEN FCT is recommended. Other repositories, such as https://github.com/ or selected from de DataCite Commons, may be used.

Definition: data produced by the authors ("primary data") and data from other sources that are analyzed by the authors ("secondary data"). Research data includes any material that is used to produce the results in digital and non-digital format. This includes tabular data, code, images, audio, documents, video, maps, raw and/or processed data. Research data that is not needed to verify published results is not covered by this policy. The policy does not require the public sharing of quantitative or qualitative data that could identify a research participant. Alternatives to the public sharing of sensitive or personal data include: depositing research data in controlled access repositories; anonymizing or de-identifying data before its public sharing; sharing only metadata about the research data; indicating procedures for accessing research data in the manuscript; and managing data access requests from other researchers.

Data sharing restrictions are permitted, subject to evaluation by the ARP editorial team. Sharing research data as supplementary information files is discouraged. ARP encourages authors to cite any publicly available research data on their reference list. References to datasets should include a persistent identifier (DOI), following ARP's citation style. Reviewers have the right to request access to underlying data when necessary to evaluate a manuscript.

 

Open Access and Publication charges

This journal offers immediate open access to its content, without processing fees, based on the principle that making scientific knowledge freely available to the public promotes greater global democratization of knowledge. Therefore, the journal does not charge any APC (article processing charges).

ARP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC BY NC), allowing access, download, copying, distribution, printing, searching, or linking to articles in full, or use for any other lawful purpose, without prior permission from the publisher or author, for non-commercial purposes. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access.

 

Digital Preservation Policy

This journal is digitally preserved through the Public Knowledge Project (PKP PN) service.

 

Editorial and Administration

SPRMN. Av. Elias Garcia, 123 - 7ºDto. 1050-098 Lisbon – Portugal.

Tel.: +351 217 970 530 / Fax: +351 217 955 012. E-mail: sprmn@sapo.pt Website: www.sprmn.pt