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| AUTHOR
CENTER HELP Instructions for Submitting a NEW Manuscript |
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| AUTHOR
CENTER HELP Instructions for Submitting a NEW Manuscript |
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Authors of all types of articles should follow the general instructions given below. Please see Article Types for word counts and instructions. Please abide by the word count guidelines. These guidelines are in accordance with the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals,” published by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors at http://www.icmje.org. For further information regarding manuscripts, please see the editorial policies of the Journal.
AUTHORSHIP
ASSURANCES In appropriate places in the manuscript, please provide the following items:
REQUIRED FORMS You do not need to send a separate cover letter file with your online submission. Instead, we offer a text box in which you can type your information, or you can cut and paste from a previously written letter. This box can also be left blank, if you wish. Any change in authorship after submission must be approved in writing by all authors. Authors of original research articles are not required to submit a formal Financial Disclosure Form at the time of submission. We will request it later, if necessary. However, we do request that you note major conflicts of interest in your cover letter or in the Source of Funding text box. All authors of review articles are required to submit our Disclosure Form for Review Articles and Editorials.
ELECTRONIC FILES AND FIGURES All text, references, figure legends, and tables should be in one
double-spaced electronic document (Word Doc or PDF). You may either
insert figures in the text file or upload your figures separately. We
prefer the former, but this may not work well for complicated graphics,
which should be sent separately. It is permissible to send low-resolution
images for peer review, although we may ask for high-resolution files
at a later stage. Our preferred file type for new manuscript submissions is Adobe Acrobat portable document format (.pdf) with all figures inserted in the same document. We will also accept Word Doc , WordPerfect (.wpd), text (.txt) documents, and .rtf file format. Acceptable formats for pictures, photos, and figures are PDF, DOC, PPT, JPG, GIF, TIF. Please be aware that we will convert all submissions to PDF for peer review.
ABSTRACT Provide an abstract of not more than 250 words. It should consist of four paragraphs, labeled Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. They should briefly describe, respectively, the problem being addressed in the study, how the study was performed, the salient results, and what the authors conclude from the results.
TABLES Double-space tables (including any footnotes) and provide a title for each. Extensive tables or supplementary material may be published on the Journal’s Web site only. For Original Articles, there is normally a limit of 5 figures and tables (total) per manuscript. Additional figures and tables may be considered as supplements for Web-only publication.
FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS Medical and scientific illustrations will be created or redrawn in-house. If an outside illustrator has created a figure, the Journal reserves the right to modify or redraw it to meet our specifications for publication. The author must explicitly acquire all rights to the illustration from the artist in order for us to publish it. Please describe and clearly indicate all modifications, selective digital adjustments, or electronic enhancements in all digital images. It is permissible to send low-resolution images for peer review, although we may ask for high-resolution files at a later stage.
PHOTOGRAPHS OF PATIENTS If photographs of patients are used, either they should not be identifiable or the photographs should be accompanied by written permission to use them. One option is our Release Form for Photographs of Identifiable Patients. SPECIAL CASES Clinical Trials The ICMJE requires that “any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention and comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome” must be registered before the start of patient enrollment. Trials in which the primary goal is to determine pharmacokinetics are exempt. To be acceptable, a registry must be owned by a non-for-profit entity, be publicly accessible, and contain the twenty fields proposed by the World Health Organization. A list of acceptable registries may be found at www.icmje.org. Each manuscript will be checked upon submission to determine whether the study needed registration, and if registered, whether the registration is complete and meaningful. Manuscripts will not enter the editorial process until they have passed this screen. All studies which began enrolling patients after July 1, 2005, must have been registered before patient enrollment. Any trial which was still seeing patients on September 13, 2005, should have been registered before September 13, 2005. If the trial was complete before September 13, 2005, the study should be registered before submission. Exceptions are granted on a case-by-case basis by the Editor-in-Chief. Microarray Studies Data obtained by microarray must be submitted to a repository such as the Gene Expression Omnibus or ArrayExpress prior to submission. The raw and transformed data sets for each microarray experiment must be provided through the repository, and the Accession Number for each experiment or series must be provided in the Methods section. If the data are password-protected, the user name and password must be provided in the cover letter and the Methods section of the manuscript at the time of submission. A criterion of publication is full access to the relevant data sets through a publicly accessible repository. JOURNAL STYLE References
Numbered references to personal communications, unpublished data, or manuscripts either “in preparation” or “submitted for publication” are unacceptable. If essential, such material can be incorporated at the appropriate place in the text.
Statistical Methods The basis for these guidelines is described in Bailar JC III, Mosteller F. Guidelines for statistical reporting in articles for medical journals: amplifications and explanations. Ann Intern Med 1988;108:266-73.
Units of Measurement Abbreviations Drug Names SUBMITTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT As of September 18th, the Journal has a new submission and peer-review system. Please log in to Manuscript Central to submit a new manuscript. If you have submitted a manuscript in the past two years or reviewed for us since 2002, an account has already been set up for you. Simply type your e-mail address into the "Forgot your Password" box on the Author Center Home Page and a password will be e-mailed to you. Otherwise, please register to create an account. Once logged in to Manuscript Central, click on "Submit a New Manuscript" and follow the instructions at the top of each screen. ON RESUBMISSIONS AND REVISIONS The Journal differentiates between (a) manuscripts that have been rejected and (b) manuscripts that will undergo further consideration after requested changes have been made. Resubmission: If you have received a letter of rejection and wish the editors to reconsider their decision, you are “resubmitting.” Your file will be considered a new submission, and you will receive a new six-digit manuscript number. Please upload a letter with specific responses to the reviewers’ comments. Revision: If the editors have asked you to make specific changes to your manuscript and return it for further consideration, you are sending a “revision.” Please refer to Submitting a REVISED Manuscript. CONFLICT OF INTEREST Authors of research articles should disclose at the time of revision any financial arrangement they may have with a company whose product is pertinent to the submitted manuscript or with a company making a competing product. Such information will be held in confidence while the paper is under review and will not influence the editorial decision, but if the article is accepted for publication, a disclosure statement will appear with the article. Because the essence of reviews and editorials is selection and interpretation of the literature, the Journal expects that authors of such articles will not have any significant financial interest in a company (or its competitor) that makes a product discussed in the article. REVIEW AND ACTION Manuscripts are examined by members of the editorial staff, and one half are sent to outside reviewers. We encourage authors to suggest the names of possible reviewers, but we reserve the right of final selection. Communications about manuscripts will be sent after the review and editorial decision-making process is complete; for potentially acceptable manuscripts, the period between the receipt of all reviews and an editorial decision is usually longer. Further information about the review process used by the Journal may be found in Tracking the Peer-Review Process. All authors will receive a copy of the acknowledgement e-mail and any notification of acceptance. COPYRIGHT The Massachusetts Medical Society is the owner of all copyright to any work published by the Society. Authors agree to execute copyright transfer forms as requested with respect to their contributions accepted by the Society. The Society and its licensees have the right to use, reproduce, transmit, derive works from, publish, and distribute the contribution, in the Journal or otherwise, in any form or medium. Authors may not use or authorize the use of the contribution without the Society’s written consent, except as may be allowed by U.S. fair-use law. Additional information is available on our copyrightpage . PRESUBMISSION INQUIRIES/FAST TRACK The Journal does consider fast track requests. We prefer to have as much time to prepare as possible. Send your summary via our Rapid Review request form. You should hear back from us within 36 hours. Rapid Review allows a manuscript to be reviewed by the Journal, and a decision on publication will be reached within two to three weeks. A Rapid Review does not in any way guarantee acceptance of the manuscript nor does it promise rapid release if the paper is accepted. Each of these decisions will be made separately. We will also consider presubmission inquiries. |
