Instructions For Authors

Organization of Sections in an Article

Sections

The cover page includes (a) complete manuscript title; (b) List all authors’ full names, highest academic degrees, professional titles, affiliations, and locations of affiliations; (c) name and address of the corresponding author, including, telephone number, and e-mail address and (d) sources of support that require acknowledgment, and a short title of no more than 45 characters (including spaces) for use as a running title.

Abstract

An abstract is required for all categories of manuscripts except for Editorial, Commentaries, Letters to the Editor, and Replies. The abstract should not exceed 500 words. The content should not have any subheadings.

For an Original Research article, the abstract should be divided into four sections: Objective, Material and Methods, Results, and Conclusions. It should not exceed 500 words.

No abstract should contain any figures, tables, or references, trade names, or manufacturer’s names.

Keywords

Provide three to six keywords at the end of the abstract for all types of articles except for Editorial, Commentaries, Letters to the Editor, and Replies.

Introduction

State the objectives of the work or investigation and provide an adequate background, avoiding a detailed literature survey or a summary of the results.

Material and Methods or Subject Profile

Provide in details to allow the work to be reproduced by an independent researcher.

Use of abbreviations renders the text difficult to read; abbreviations should be limited to SI units of measurement and to those most commonly used. Generic names of drugs and equipment should be used throughout the manuscript, with brand names (proprietary name) and the name and location (city, state, country) of the manufacturer in brackets when first mentioned in the text.

Methods that are already published should be summarized, and indicated by a reference. If quoting directly from a previously published method, use quotation marks and also cite the source. Any modifications to existing methods should also be described.

When reporting on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Helsinki Declaration (1964, amended most recently in 2008) of the World Medical Association. Manuscripts should include a statement that the patient’s written consent was obtained and any information should be as anonymized as much as possible. Authors should indicate that the design of the work has been approved by local ethical committees or that it conforms to standards currently applied in the country of origin.The name of the authorizing body should be stated in the paper.

Manuscripts should include a detailed statistic method and explain the method chosen.

Study Design

Selection and Description of Participants: Describe your selection of the observational or experimental participants (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) clearly, including eligibility and exclusion criteria and a description of the source population. Technical information: Identify the methods, apparatus (give the manufacturer’s name and address in parentheses), and procedures in sufficient detail to allow other workers to reproduce the results. Give references to established methods, including statistical methods (see below); provide references and brief descriptions for methods that have been published but are not well known; describe new or substantially modified methods, give reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations. Identify precisely all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration.

Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol number and date, assignment of interventions (methods of randomization, concealment of allocation to treatment groups), and the method of masking (blinding), based on the CONSORT Statement (http://www.consort-statement.org).

Statistics

Whenever possible quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). The authors should report losses to observation (such as dropouts from a clinical trial). When data are summarized in the Result section, specify the statistical methods used to analyze them. Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as ‘random’ (which implies a randomizing device), ‘normal’, ‘significant’, ‘correlations’, and ‘sample’. Define statistical terms, abbreviations, and most symbols. Specify the computer software used. For all P values include the exact value and not less than 0.05 or 0.001. Mean differences in continuous variables, proportions in categorical variables and relative risks including odds ratios and hazard ratios should be accompanied by their confidence intervals.

Results

Results should be clear and concise. They should be presented either in tables and figures, and briefly commented on in the text, or in the text alone. Repetition of results should be avoided!

The full set of raw data must be available at any time should reviewers or editors request these for more in-depth review during the review process and/or after publication.

Discussion

This should discuss and interpret the results and significance of the work. It should be clear and concise. Avoid extensive citations and discussion of published literature. The importance of the study and its limitations should be discussed.

Conclusion

A short and concise conclusion for the investigation should be included. Repetition of results and discussion should be avoided!

Acknowledgement

Acknowledgements and details of non-financial support must be included at the end of the text before the references and not in footnotes. Personal acknowledgements should precede those of institutions or agencies.

Artwork

This section describes the artwork for this journal.

Electronic artwork

General points

• Make sure you use uniform lettering and sizing of your original artwork.
• Embed the used fonts if the application provides that option.
• Aim to use the following fonts in your illustrations: Arial, Courier, Times New Roman, Symbol, or use fonts that look similar.
• Number the illustrations according to their sequence in the text.
• Use a logical naming convention for your artwork files.
• Provide captions to illustrations separately.
• Size the illustrations close to the desired dimensions of the published version.
• Submit each illustration as a separate file.
• Ensure that color images are accessible to all, including those with impaired color vision.

Disclosure of any funding to the study

Any funding and conflict of interest should be disclosed.

List funding sources in this standard way to facilitate compliance to funder’s requirements:

Funding: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA [grant number zzzz]; and the United States Institutes of Peace [grant number aaaa].

It is not necessary to include detailed descriptions on the program or type of grants and awards. When funding is from a block grant or other resources available to a university, college, or other research institution, submit the name of the institute or organization that provided the funding.

If no funding has been provided for the research, please include the following sentence:

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Disclosure of any conflict of interest

Any funding and conflict of interest section should be disclosed.

References

Authors are responsible for checking the accuracy of all references. If you use EndNote or Reference Manager to facilitate referencing citations (not required for submission), this journal’s style is available for use.

Citation in text

Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). Any references cited in the abstract must be given in full. Unpublished results and personal communications are not recommended in the reference list, but may be mentioned in the text. If these references are included in the reference list they should follow the standard reference style of the journal and should include a substitution of the publication date with either ‘Unpublished results’ or ‘Personal communication’. Citation of a reference as ‘in press’ implies that the item has been accepted for publication.

Web references

As a minimum, the full URL should be given and the date when the reference was last accessed. Any further information, if known (DOI, author names, dates, reference to a source publication, etc.), should also be given. Web references can be listed separately (e.g., after the reference list) under a different heading if desired, or can be included in the reference list.

Data references

This journal encourages you to cite underlying or relevant datasets in your manuscript by citing them in your text and including a data reference in your Reference List. Data references should include the following elements: author name(s), dataset title, data repository, version (where available), year, and global persistent identifier. Add [dataset] immediately before the reference so we can properly identify it as a data reference. The [dataset] identifier will not appear in your published article.

Preprint references

Where a preprint has subsequently become available as a peer-reviewed publication, the formal publication should be used as the reference. If there are preprints that are central to your work or that cover crucial developments in the topic, but are not yet formally published, these may be referenced. Preprints should be clearly marked as such, for example by including the word preprint, or the name of the preprint server, as part of the reference. The preprint DOI should also be provided.

References in a special issue

Please ensure that the words ‘this issue’ are added to any references in the list (and any citations in the text) to other articles in the same Special Issue.

Reference management software

Most Elsevier journals have their reference template available in many of the most popular reference management software products. These include all products that support Citation Style Language styles, such as Mendeley. Using citation plug-ins from these products, authors only need to select the appropriate journal template when preparing their article, after which citations and bibliographies will be automatically formatted in the journal’s style. If no template is yet available for this journal, please follow the format of the sample references and citations as shown in this Guide. If you use reference management software, please ensure that you remove all field codes before submitting the electronic manuscript. More information on how to remove field codes from different reference management software.

Reference style

Text: All citations in the text should refer to:

1. Single author: the author’s name (without initials, unless there is ambiguity) and the year of publication;

2. Two authors: both authors’ names and the year of publication;

3. Three or more authors: first author’s name followed by ‘et al.’ and the year of publication.

Citations may be made directly (or parenthetically). Groups of references can be listed either first alphabetically, then chronologically, or vice versa.

Examples: ‘as demonstrated (Allan, 2000a, 2000b, 1999; Allan and Jones, 1999)… Or, as demonstrated (Jones, 1999; Allan, 2000)… Kramer et al. (2010) have recently shown…’

List: References should be arranged first alphabetically and then further sorted chronologically if necessary. More than one reference from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the letters ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, etc., placed after the year of publication.

Examples:

Reference to a journal publication:

Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J.A.J., Lupton, R.A., 2010. The art of writing a scientific article. J. Sci. Commun. 163, 51-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.Sc.2010.00372.

Reference to a journal publication with an article number:

Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J.A.J., Lupton, R.A., 2018. The art of writing a scientific article. Heliyon. 19, e00205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2018.e00205.

Reference to a book:

Strunk Jr., W., White, E.B., 2000. The Elements of Style, fourth ed. Longman, New York.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book:

Mettam, G.R., Adams, L.B., 2009. How to prepare an electronic version of your article, in: Jones, B.S., Smith , R.Z. (Eds.), Introduction to the Electronic Age. E-Publishing Inc., New York, pp. 281-304.

Reference to a website:

Cancer Research UK, 1975. Cancer statistics reports for the UK. http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/aboutcancer/statistics/cancerstatsreport/ (accessed 13 March 2003).

Reference to a dataset:

[dataset] Oguro, M., Imahiro, S., Saito, S., Nakashizuka, T., 2015. Mortality data for Japanese oak wilt disease and surrounding forest compositions. Mendeley Data, v1. https://doi.org/10.17632/xwj98nb39r.1.

Reference to software:

Coon, E., Berndt, M., Jan, A., Svyatsky, D., Atchley, A., Kikinzon, E., Harp, D., Manzini, G., Shelef, E., Lipnikov, K., Garimella, R., Xu, C., Moulton, D., Karra, S., Painter, S., Jafarov, E., & Molins, S., 2020. Advanced Terrestrial Simulator (ATS) v0.88 (Version 0.88). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3727209.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material such as applications, images and sound clips, can be published with your article to enhance it. Submitted supplementary items are published exactly as they are received (Excel or PowerPoint files will appear as such online). Please submit your material together with the article and supply a concise, descriptive caption for each supplementary file. If you wish to make changes to supplementary material during any stage of the process, please make sure to provide an updated file. Do not annotate any corrections on a previous version. Please switch off the ‘Track Changes’ option in Microsoft Office files as these will appear in the published version.

List the first six contributors followed by et al in all references.

Issue with supplement
Payne DK, Sullivan MD, Massie MJ. Women’s psychological reactions to breast cancer. Semin Oncol 1996;23(1, Suppl 2):89-97.

Volume with supplement
Shen HM, Zhang QF. Risk assessment of nickel carcinogenicity and occupational lung cancer. Environ Health Perspect 1994;102 Suppl 1:275-82.

Books and Other Monographs

Personal Author(s):

Ringsven MK, Bond D. Gerontology and leadership skills for nurses. 2nd ed. Albany (NY): Delmar Publishers; 1996.

Editor(s), compiler(s) as author:

Norman IJ, Redfern SJ, editors. Mental health care for elderly people. New York: Churchill Livingstone; 1996.

Chapter in A Book
Turgut AT, Dogra VS. Prostate carcinoma: Evaluation using transrectal sonography. In: Hayat MA, ed. Methods of cancer diagnosis, therapy and prognosis. 1st ed. New York, NA: Elsevier; 2008. p. 499-520.

Electronic Sources as Reference

Refer APA’s Quick guide on reference for electronic references.

Monograph on the Internet format: Foley KM, Gelband H, editors. Improving palliative care for cancer [monograph on the Internet]. Washington: National Academy Press; 2001 [cited 2002 Jul 9].

Refer Homepage/Web site and Part of a homepage/Web site formats in the hyperlink provided

Tables

Tables must be significant and provide a good summary of the study. Tables should be self-explanatory and not duplicate the data given in the text or figures. Each table must have a descriptive title, and each column a heading. Tables must contain a minimum of four lines and two columns of data and not exceed 10 columns and 25 rows. Tables are numbered in the order in which they are cited in the text. Abbreviations used in the tables are defined below each table. All arithmetic calculations (percentages, totals, differences) must be double-checked for accuracy, and data must agree with the data given in the text.

Graphs

Graphs need to be exported as JPEG or TIF images and submitted as figures. Graphs and line drawings need to be a minimum of 1000 dpi. Graphs should include clearly labeled error bars described in the figure legend. The authors must state whether a number that follows the ± sign is a standard error (SEM) or a standard deviation (SD). The number of independent data points (N) represented in a graph must be indicated in the legend. Numerical axes on graphs should go to 0, except for log axes.

Figure/Image Legends

All figure parts relating to one image should have the same figure number. The style for figure legends is given here:
Figure 1: Age and gender of the patient followed by presenting symptoms and subsequent diagnosis. Imaging modality used, organ/section imaged, view, and abnormality seen in the image. Add arrows pointing to the abnormality seen in the image.
Example: Figure 1: 42-year-old woman with Behçet disease who presented with dyspnea. (a) Contrast-enhanced CT image shows the increased diameter of both middle and lower lobe pulmonary arteries (arrows) on the right; the aneurysms are partially thrombosed. (b) CT image with lung window shows well-defined lung parenchymal nodules (arrow) corresponding to the aneurysms.

Written permission to reprint in print and electronic media, including online use, must be obtained for all previously published illustrations, and an appropriate credit line to be given in the legends.

Figures/Images

All images should be uploaded in JPEG, or TIF, format. The file size should be within 12 MB in size. Figures should be numbered consecutively according to the order in which they have been first cited in the text. Labels, numbers, and symbols should be clear and of uniform size. The lettering for figures should be large enough to be legible after reduction to fit the width of a printed column. Symbols, arrows, or letters used in photomicrographs should contrast with the background and should be marked neatly with transfer type or by tissue overlay and not by pen. Titles and detailed explanations belong in the legends for figures not on the figure/image themselves. The photographs and figures should be trimmed to remove all the unwanted areas and the patient’s name and medical record number. If photographs of individuals are used, their pictures must be accompanied by written permission to use the photograph and eyes must be covered. If a figure has been published elsewhere, the original source must be acknowledged and written permission from the copyright holder submitted to reproduce the material. A credit line should appear in the legend for such figures. Electronic manipulation of images that materially alters the medical information must be identified and the nature of the alterations described. Symbols used must be uniform in size and style and large enough to withstand reduction. Line drawings and graphs should be in black on a white background, using the same size type as the text. 0.5 mm hairline rules must be avoided. Authors’ names and affiliations must not appear anywhere on the images.

Image Size

Black & white images: JPEG, or TIF format, Grayscale mode, and 300 DPI resolution. The height and width of an image should be at least 6 x 5 inches.

Color images: 300 DPI resolution, no layered files, no alpha channels. Color profile if used: CMYK (No Indexed Color, Lab, or RGB profiles)

Line art: 1200 DPI resolution, Grayscale or Jpeg format. No layered files, no alpha channels. Color profile if used: CMYK (No Indexed Color, Lab, or RGB profiles) The Journal reserves the right to crop, rotate, reduce, or enlarge the photographs to an acceptable size.

Video Clips

The journal encourages authors to submit video clips, cine clips, or real-time images (preferably in ‘mp4’). The maximum size of each multimedia file should not exceed 400 MB. In addition to the video content, authors must provide a still image from each video file. Supply TIFF or JPEG files.