Authors:

It gives us immense pleasure to share this JPMA special supplement with our readers, published as an adjunct to the 34th International Pak OrthoCon Conference. The themes of the conference are: Ageing Gracefully, Frugal Innovations & Orthopaedic Complications.

We are grateful for the enormous response from both national and international contributors and a total of 72 manuscripts were received. We adopted JPMA's strict criteria for publication and each submission was first evaluated for plagiarism through specialized computer software. No manuscript was rejected at this level. This was followed by coding of each submission to insure that the peer-review process remains blinded and transparent. Each submission was then assigned to two independent reviewers, who were subject specialists belonging to the same specialty, again based on standard JPMA policy. In case of discrepancy, a statistical review or a third editorial review was also done. Complete confidentiality of the reviewers was ensured. All reviews were carried out on standard JPMA review forms. Only articles that were judged by both reviewers to be publishable in their present form; or with minor changes only, were selected. Articles requiring major revisions were not considered for publication.

A total of 24 articles were thus accepted for publication. This final list of articles was forwarded to JPMA for final editorial review, along with the comments of the reviewers. At this point we must mention that some of the rejected articles were actually of reasonable quality, but could not be published, on the basis that they were not related to the theme or required major revisions in either format or language, which given the short time-line, was not possible for this particular supplement.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our Conference Chair: Dr. Masood Umer | Scientific Chair: Dr. Haroon ur Rashid |JPMA Publication Committee Chair: Dr. Rizwan Haroon and other team members of our publication committee: Drs. Tashfeen Ahmad, Yasir Mohib, Akbar Jaleel Zuberi, Naveed Juman Baloch and our administrative staffs, Syed Saad (Administrator, POA) and Shariff Charania (Associate, Department of Surgery, AKU) who worked tirelessly day and night and made this herculean task possible. We hope you will appreciate the quality of papers in this supplement.

We look forward to welcoming you all and we hope you will take an active participation in the 34th International Pak OrthoCon Conference to be held on November 11-14, 2021.

Publication Committee

34th International Pak OrthoCon Conference