![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() | 5-Apr-2004 |
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Instructions for Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry authors |
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General information
Submission process
Files can be submitted as a batch, or one by one. The submission process can be interrupted at any time - when users return to the site, they can carry on where they left off. See below for examples of acceptable word processor and graphics file formats. Additional files of any type, such as movies, animations, or original datafiles, can also be submitted as part of the publication. Assistance with the process of manuscript preparation and submission is available from the customer support team (info@biomedcentral.com).
Publication
Article-processing charges
Editorial policies
Authors are required to ensure that no material submitted as part of a manuscript infringes existing copyrights, or the rights of a third party. The manuscript should not already have been published in a journal and should not be under consideration by any other journal, but it can already have been deposited on a preprint server. Authors who publish in Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry retain copyright to their work (more information). Submission of a manuscript reporting experimental research on humans or animals implies that authors have obtained approval for their research from the appropriate ethics committee, and are in compliance with the Helsinki Declaration. A statement to this effect must be included in the Methods section of your manuscript. We ask authors of Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry papers to complete a declaration of competing interests, which should be provided as a separate section of the manuscript, to follow the Acknowledgements. Where an author gives no competing interests, the listing will read 'Competing interests: none declared'. The following articles give more information on competing interests: For all articles that include information or clinical photographs relating to individual patients, written and signed consent from each patient to publish must also be mailed or faxed to the editorial staff. The manuscript should also include a statement to this effect in the Acknowledgements section, as follows: "Written consent was obtained from the patient or their relative for publication of study". Authors from pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that sponsor clinical trials, should adhere to the Good Publication Practice guidelines for pharmaceutical companies, which are designed to ensure that publications are produced in a responsible and ethical manner. The guidelines also apply to any companies or individuals that work on industry-sponsored publications, such as freelance writers, contract research organizations and communications companies. Generic drug names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses in the Methods section.
Special requirements for reports of
randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, and
meta-analyses
Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry also supports prospective registration and numbering of randomized controlled trials. Authors submitting trials (whether as protocols or reports of data) are encouraged to apply for an International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN), available from Current Controlled Trials. An ISRCTN will be required before publication of accepted trials protocols and reports, and will be included in the title of the article. ISRCTNs can be obtained by completing the online application form. The charge for acquiring an ISRCTN will be covered by the article-processing charge paid on acceptance of the article. |
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Preparing main manuscript text
File formats
Users of other word processing packages should save or convert their files to RTF before uploading. Many free tools are available which ease this process. TeX/LaTeX users: We recommend using BioMed Central's TeX template and BibTeX stylefile. If you use this standard format, you can submit your manuscript in TeX format. If you have used another template for your manuscript, or if you do not wish to use BibTeX, then please submit your manuscript as a DVI file. We do not recommend converting to RTF. Note that figures must be submitted as separate image files, not as part of the submitted DOC/PDF/TEX/DVI file.
Article types
Please read the descriptions of each of the article types, choose which is appropriate for your article and structure it accordingly. If in doubt, your manuscript should be classified as Primary research, the structure for which is described below.
Manuscript sections for Primary research articles
You can download a template (Mac and Windows compatible; Microsoft Word 98/2000) for your article. For instructions on use, see below. Title pageThis should list the title of the article. The title should include the study design, for example: A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study The full names, institutional addresses, and email addresses for all authors must be included on the title page. The corresponding author should also be indicated.
Abstract
Background
Methods
Results and Discussion
Conclusions
List of abbreviations
Competing interests
The questions that are asked of authors are:
Authors' contributions
Acknowledgements
References
Only articles and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers, may be cited; unpublished abstracts, unpublished data and personal communications should not be included in the reference list, but may be included in the text. Notes/footnotes are not allowed. Obtaining permission to quote personal communications and unpublished data from the cited author(s) is the responsibility of the author. Journal abbreviations follow Index Medicus/MEDLINE. Citations in the reference list should contain all named authors, regardless of how many there are. There should usually be no more than 50 references per article. We encourage authors to use a recent version of EndNote (version 5 and above) or Reference Manager (version 10) when formatting their reference list, as this allows references to be automatically extracted. Authors submitting articles in EndNote 5 or higher or Reference Manager 10 format will save $50 on the $525 article processing charge. In order to obtain this discount, you should upload the manuscript file containing your EndNote or Reference Manager-formatted bibliography as a .doc file. Please ensure you do not convert to another format (e.g. RTF or PDF). On upload, the discount will be automatically granted and you will receive a confirmation on-screen and by email. You will also be able to preview an HTML version of the extracted references during submission, and we urge authors to check this. EndNote or Reference Manager users should also make sure that any changes made to the reference list are done within their reference management program, rather than by manually editing the formatted bibliography. This is because manually introduced changes will not be picked up in the automatically extracted list. Further details about EndNote and Reference Manager are available on the BioMed Central site, including information about how to upgrade. Style files that conform to the BioMed Central style are available for EndNote and Reference Manager. Users of other reference management programs should be able to select other journal styles that output a numeric list styled similarly to the guide below. Examples of the Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry reference style are shown below. Please take care to follow the reference style precisely; references not in the correct style may be retyped, necessitating tedious proofreading.
Links
Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry reference style
Article within a journal
Article within a journal supplement
In press article
Published abstract
Article within conference proceedings
Book chapter, or article within a book
Whole issue of journal
Whole conference proceedings
Complete book
Monograph or book in a series
Book with institutional author
PhD thesis
Link / URL
Microsoft Word template
Download the template (Mac and Windows compatible Word 1998/2000) from our site, and save it to your hard drive. Double click the template to open it.
How to use the Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry template
For extra convenience, you can use the template as one of your standard Word templates. To do this, put a copy of the template file in Word's 'Templates' folder, normally C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates on a PC. The next time you create a new document in Word using the File menu, the template will appear as one of the available choices for a new document. Note - From version 6, EndNote includes a full set of structured article templates for BioMed Central journals. Users of EndNote are encouraged to upgrade if necessary and make use of these templates. More information is available here. |
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Preparing illustrations and figuresIllustrations should be provided as separate files, not embedded in the text file. Each figure should include a single illustration, which should be submitted as a separate graphics file. There is no charge for the use of color figures. Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the illustration. If a figure consists of separate parts, it is important that a single composite illustration file should be submitted which contains all parts of the figure. Photographs should be provided with a scale bar if appropriate, as well as high-resolution component files. If photographs of patients' body parts, X-rays or scans are given as part of the manuscript, written and signed consent of the patient should also be sent or faxed to the editors.
Scaling/resolution
Text within figures should use either Arial or Helvetica fonts, although Courier may also be used if a monospaced font is required. Text too should be designed to be legible when the illustration is scaled to a width of 600 pixels.
Formats
Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry is not able to process figures submitted in GIF format. If the large size of TIFF or EPS figures is an obstacle to online submission, authors may find that conversion to JPEG format before submission results in significantly reduced file size (and upload time), while retaining acceptable quality. JPEG is a 'lossy' format, however. In order to maintain acceptable image quality, it is recommended that JPEG files are saved at High or Maximum quality. Files should not be compressed with tools such as Zipit or Stuffit prior to submission. These tools will in any case produce negligible file-size savings for JPEGs and TIFFs, which are already compressed.
Image conversion tools
Good general tools for image conversion include GraphicConverter on the Macintosh, PaintShop Pro, for Windows, and ImageMagick, which is available on Macintosh, Windows and UNIX platforms. Note that bitmap images (e.g. screenshots) should not be converted to EPS since this will result in a much larger file size than the equivalent JPEG, TIFF, PNG or BMP, with no increase in quality. EPS should only be used for images produced by vector drawing applications such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. Most vector drawing applications can save in EPS format. If images have been originally prepared in an Office application, such as Word or PowerPoint, then the Office files should be directly uploaded to the site, rather than converted to JPEG or another format that may be of reduced quality.
Figure legends
Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures or tables that have previously been published elsewhere. |
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Preparing tablesEach table should be numbered in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e. Table 1, 2, 3 etc.). Tables should also have a title that summarizes the whole table, maximum 15 words. Detailed legends may then follow, but should be concise. Smaller tables considered to be integral to the manuscript can be pasted into the end of the document text file. These will be typeset and displayed in the final published form of the article. Such tables should be formatted using the 'Table object' in a word processing program to ensure that columns of data are kept aligned when the file is sent electronically for review; this will not always be the case if columns are generated by simply using tabs to separate text. Columns and rows of data should be made visibly distinct by ensuring the borders of each cell display as black lines. Larger datasets can be uploaded separately as additional files. Additional files will not be displayed in the final, published form of the article, but a link will be provided to the files as supplied by the author. Tabular data provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls) or comma separated values (.csv). As with all files, please use the standard file extensions. |
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Preparing additional files
Additional files
Additional data files may be referenced generically within the body of the article. e.g. "See additional data file 1 for the original data used to perform this analysis". Additional files are considered integral to articles published by Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry. There is no distinction between the main article and 'supplementary material'. Files will be virus-scanned on submission.
File formats
File extensions
Although Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry does not restrict the length and quantity of data in a paper, there may still be occasions where an author wishes to provide data sets, tables, movie files, or other information as additional information. These files can be uploaded using the 'Additional Material files' button in the manuscript submission process. The maximum file size for additional files is 10 MB, and files will be virus-scanned on submission. Any additional files will be linked into the final published article in the form supplied by the author, but will not be displayed within the paper. They will be made available in exactly the same form as originally provided. If additional material is provided, please list the following information in a separate section of the manuscript text, immediately following the tables (if any):
Additional datafiles should be referenced explicitly by file name within the body of the article, e.g. 'See additional file 1: Movie1 for the original data used to perform this analysis'.
Formats and uploading
As with figure files, files should be given the standard file extensions. This is especially important for Macintosh users, since the Mac OS does not enforce the use of standard extensions. Please also make sure that each additional file is a single table, figure or movie (please do not upload linked worksheets or PDF files larger than one sheet). |
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Style and language
General
Gene names should be in italic, but protein products should be in plain type. There is no explicit limit on the length of articles submitted, but authors are encouraged to be concise. There is also no restriction on the number of figures, tables or additional files that can be included with each article online. Figure and tables should be sequentially referenced. Authors should include all relevant supporting data with each article. Annals of General Hospital Psychiatry will not edit submitted manuscripts for style or language; reviewers may advise rejection of a manuscript if it is compromised by grammatical errors. Authors are advised to write clearly and simply, and to have their article checked by colleagues before submission. In-house copyediting will be minimal. Non-native speakers of English may choose to make use of a copyediting service such as that provided by Biology Editors, Manuscript Presentation Service and English Manager Science Editing. BioMed Central has no first-hand experience of these companies and takes no responsibility for the quality of their service.
Help and advice on scientific
writing
Abbreviations
Units
Last revised: 13 October 2003 |
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info@general-hospital-psychiatry.com |