Author CenterNew Manuscripts
Manuscripts containing original material are accepted for consideration if neither the article nor any part of its essential substance, tables, or figures has been or will be published or submitted elsewhere before appearing in the Journal. This restriction does not apply to abstracts or press reports published in connection with scientific meetings. Copies of any closely related manuscripts must be submitted along with the manuscript that is to be considered by the Journal. The Journal discourages the submission of more than one article dealing with related aspects of the same study.
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.
For further information regarding manuscripts, please see the editorial policies of the Journal.
AUTHORSHIP
As stated in the Uniform Requirements, credit for authorship requires substantial contributions to (a) the conception and design or analysis and interpretation of the data, (b) the drafting of the article or critical revision for important intellectual content, and c) final approval of the version to be published. Each author must sign a statement attesting that he or she fulfills the authorship criteria of the Uniform Requirements. At least one person’s name must accompany a group name (e.g., Thelma J. Smith, for the Boston Porphyria Group). As part of the submission process, authors must indicate whether any writing assistance other than copy editing was provided.
Any change in authorship after submission must be approved in writing by all authors.
ASSURANCES
In appropriate places in the manuscript, please provide the following items:
- If applicable, a statement that the research protocol was approved by the relevant institutional review boards or ethics committees and that all human participants gave written informed consent
- The identity of those who analyzed the data.
- For clinical trials, the registration number and registry name (see N Engl J Med 2004;351:1250-1).
- For studies containing microarrays, the accession numbers and repository name.
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.
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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.
Legends for all figures should be included in the file with the text and should not appear on the figures.
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 include a title page with your submission that includes the title of the manuscript, each author's name and affiliation/institution, and contact information for the corresponding author.
Please be aware that we will convert all submissions to PDF for peer review.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. View a list of acceptable registries on the ICMJE website.
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.
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.
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JOURNAL STYLE
References
References must be double-spaced and numbered consecutively as they are cited. References first cited in a table or figure legend should be numbered so that they will be in sequence with references cited in the text at the point where the table or figure is first mentioned. List all authors when there are six or fewer; when there are seven or more, list the first three, followed by “et al.” The following are sample references:
- Shapiro AMJ, Lakey JRT, Ryan EA, et al. Islet transplantation in seven patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus using a glucocorticoid-free immunosuppressive regimen. N Engl J Med 2000;343:230-8.
- Goadsby PJ. Pathophysiology of headache. In: Silberstein SD, Lipton RB, Dalessio DJ, eds. Wolff's headache and other head pain. 7th ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001:57-72.
- Kuczmarski RJ, Ogden CL, Grammer-Strawn LM, et al. CDC growth charts: United States. Advance data from vital and health statistics. No. 314. Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 2000. (DHHS publication no. (PHS) 2000-1250 0-0431.)
- U.S. positions on selected issues at the third negotiating session of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Washington, D.C.: Committee on Government Reform, 2002. (Accessed March 4, 2002, at http://www.house.gov/reform/min/inves_tobacco/index_accord.htm.)
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.
- Exact methods should be used as extensively as possible in the analysis of categorical data. For analysis of measurements, nonparametric methods should be used to compare groups when the distribution of the dependent variable is not normal.
- Results should be presented with only as much precision as is of scientific value. For example, measures of association, such as odds ratios, should ordinarily be reported to two significant digits.
- Measures of uncertainty, such as confidence intervals, should be used consistently, including in figures that present aggregated results.
- Except when one-sided tests are required by study design, such as in noninferiority trials, all reported P values should be two-sided. In general, P values larger than 0.01 should be reported to two decimal places, those between 0.01 and 0.001 to three decimal places; P values smaller than 0.001 should be reported as P<0.001. Notable exceptions to this policy include P values arising in the application of stopping rules to the analysis of clinical trials and genetic-screening studies.
- For tables comparing treatment or exposure groups in a randomized trial (usually the first table in the trial report), significant differences between or among groups should be indicated by * for P < 0.05, ** for P < 0.01, and *** for P < 0.001with an explanation in the footnote if required. The body of the table should not include a column of P values.
- In manuscripts that report on randomized clinical trials, authors may provide a flow diagram in CONSORT format and all of the information required by the CONSORT checklist. When restrictions on length prevent the inclusion of some of this information in the manuscript, it may be provided in a separate document submitted with the manuscript. The CONSORT statement, checklist, and flow diagram are available on the CONSORT website.
Units of Measurement
Authors should express all measurements in conventional units, with Système International (SI) units given in parentheses throughout the text. Figures and tables should use conventional units, with conversion factors given in legends or footnotes. In accordance with the Uniform Requirements, however, manuscripts containing only SI units will not be returned for that reason.
Abbreviations
Except for units of measurement, abbreviations are strongly discouraged. Except for units of measurement, the first time an abbreviation appears, it should be preceded by the words for which it stands.
Drug Names
Generic names should be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand name and the name of the manufacturer in parentheses after the first mention of the generic name in the Methods section.
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SUBMITTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT
Please log in to ScholarOne Manuscripts to submit a new manuscript. Once logged in to ScholarOne Manuscripts, click on "Submit a New Manuscript" and follow the instructions at the top of each screen.
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.
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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.
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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 copyright page.
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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.
