Guidance for Authors on the Preparation and Submission of Manuscripts to Medknow Journals

Wolters Kluwer and Medknow expect the highest ethical standards from their authors, reviewers and editors when conducting research, submitting papers and throughout the peer-review process.

Note: These instructions comply with those formulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). For further details, authors should consult the following article: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” New Engl J Med 1997, 336:309–315. The complete document appears at http://www.icmje.org

• Redundant or duplicate publication
  We ask you to confirm that your paper is original, has not been published in its current form or a substantially similar form (in print or electronically, including on a web site), that it has not been accepted for publication elsewhere, and that it is not under consideration by another publication. The ICMJE has provided details of what is and what is not duplicate or redundant publication. If you are in doubt (particularly in the case of material that you have posted on a web site), we ask you to proceed with your submission but to include a copy of the relevant previously published work or work under consideration by other journals. Authors must draw attention to any published work that concerns the same patients or subjects as the present paper in a covering letter with their article.

• Conflicts of interest
  Authors must state all possible conflicts of interest in the manuscript, including financial, consultant, institutional and other relationships that might lead to bias or a conflict of interest. If there is no conflict of interest, this should also be explicitly stated as none declared. All sources of funding should be acknowledged in the manuscript.

• Permissions to reproduce previously published material
  Medknow requires you to send us copies of permission to reproduce material (such as illustrations) from the copyright holder. Articles cannot be published without these permissions.

• Patient consent forms
  The protection of a patient's right to privacy is essential. Please collect and keep copies of patients’ consent forms on which patients or other subjects of your experiments clearly grant permission for the publication of photographs or other material that might identify them. If the consent form for your research did not specifically include this, please obtain it or remove the identifying material.
  
  A statement to the effect that such consent had been obtained must be included in the ‘Methods’ section of your paper. If necessary the individual journal Editor(s) may request a copy of any consent forms.

• Ethics committee approval
  All articles dealing with original human or animal data must include a statement on ethics approval at the beginning of the Methods section. This paragraph must contain the following information: the name and address of the ethics committee responsible; the protocol number that was attributed by this ethics committee; the name of the Chairperson of the ethics committee (or the person who approved the protocol) and the date of approval by the ethics committee.

  The paragraph could read, for example:

  Ethics: Ethical approval for this study (Ethical Committee N° NAC 207) was provided by the Ethical Committee NAC of Geneva University Hospitals, Geneva, Switzerland (Chairperson Prof N. Dupont) on 12 February 2007.

In addition and as stated above, for studies conducted on human participants you must state clearly that you obtained written informed consent from the study participants; please also look at the latest version of the Declaration of Helsinki. Similarly, for experiments involving animals you must state the care of animal and licensing guidelines under which the study was performed and report these in accordance with the ARRIVE (Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) statement. If ethics clearance was not necessary, or if there was any deviation from these standard ethical requests, please state why it was not required. Please note that the editors may ask you to provide evidence of ethical approval. If you have approval from a National Drug Agency (or similar) please state this and provide details, this can be particularly useful when discussing the use of unlicensed drugs.

• Adherence to international guidelines on adequate data reporting
  Medknow adheres to the guidelines on adequate data reporting that were established by The Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research (EQUATOR) network (http://www.equator-network.org/home/).

• Authorship
  We ask all authors to confirm that they have read and approved the paper. Second, we ask all authors to confirm that they have met the criteria for authorship as established by the ICMJE, believe that the paper represents honest work, and are able to verify the validity of the results reported.

  All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. One or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article. Authorship credit should be based only on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2 and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship. All others who contributed to the work who are not authors should be named in the Acknowledgements section.

• Retractions
  Wolters Kluwer is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and also refers to the ICMJE advice on Corrections, Retractions and "Expressions of Concern" as well as on Overlapping Publications.

In any instance please do not hesitate to contact us at info @ medknow .com for further clarification.