Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The Texas Heart Institute Journal strives to maintain best practices for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) through these actions:

• Accepting submissions from authors regardless of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and geography
• Enlisting editors and Editorial Board members from diverse backgrounds to develop and maintain DEI policies
• Training journal staff on DEI policies
• Encouraging reviewers to objectively evaluate the scientific merit of a paper—not the authors or their geographic location—by optimizing the peer review forms
• Publishing high-quality, informative articles that are freely available to read and to reuse
• Using inclusive language to avoid introducing bias against persons or groups on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and geography (from the AMA Manual of Style, 11th ed., https://doi.org/10.1093/jama/9780190246556.001.0001)
  Examples:
  They/them instead of he/she
  Senior instead of elderly
  Patients with epilepsy instead of epileptics
• Following and implementing updates recommended by organizations such as COPE