Essential Elements of a Manuscript

Essential Elements of Manuscript Submissions

Before submitting, please review the following guidelines. Each submitted manuscript must address the following elements:

Clinical Trial Registration

JDSM requires that all clinical trials, regardless of when they were completed, and all partial and secondary analyses of original clinical trials must be registered before submission of a manuscript based on the trial. Trials must have been registered at or before the onset of patient enrollment for any clinical trial that began patient enrollment on or after February 1, 2007. The trial name, URL, and identification number should be included at the end of the manuscript abstract. The following trial registries are acceptable:

Ethics of Investigation

Authors should specify within the manuscript whether ethical standards were used in their research. If results of an experimental investigation in human or animal subjects are reported, the manuscript should describe the approval by an institutional review board on human or animal research and the appropriate informed consent procedures for human subjects. If approval by an institutional review board is not possible, then information must be included indicating that clinical experiments conform to the principles outline by the Declaration of Helsinki.

Privacy and Informed Consent

Authors must omit from their manuscripts, figures, tables and supplemental material any identifying details regarding patients and study participants, including patients’ names, initials, Social Security numbers, or hospital numbers. If there is a possibility that a patient may be identified in text, figures, photos or video, authors must obtain written informed consent for use for in publication of print, online, and licensed uses of JDSM, from the patient or parent or guardian and provide copies of the consent forms to JDSM. In such cases where the patient may be identified, authors must indicate that they have obtained informed consent in their manuscript. In addition, all authors are responsible for ensuring that their manuscript, figures, tables and supplemental material comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)(www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa).

Authorship

All authors listed on the manuscript should have participated sufficiently in the work and analysis of data, as well as the writing of the manuscript to be listed as a co-author. All authors should have read and approved the final version. All authors will be required to attest to their involvement and approval of the final version prior to publication of the manuscript. The title page should state that all authors have seen and approved the manuscript. For guidelines on authorship, please refer to the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, formulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. More than one corresponding author is permitted for each manuscript, and both authors will appear on the correspondence line on the final article. However, only one can be considered the corresponding author in the manuscript submission system; thus, only the author entered in the system as the corresponding author will receive automated messages, such as editors’ decisions and page proofs.

Originality

By submitting a manuscript to the journal, the authors affirm that it is an original manuscript, is unpublished work, and is not under consideration elsewhere.

Authorship and "Umbrella" groups

Many large collaborative studies are organized under a group name that represents all the participants. All articles must have at least one named individual as author. Authors who wish to acknowledge the umbrella group from which the data originated should list the authors of the article, followed by "on behalf of the [GROUP NAME]". The members of the group should be listed individually in the acknowledgments section.

Conflict of Interest

On the manuscript's title page, all authors must disclose any financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or other situations that might raise the question of bias in the work reported or the conclusions, implications, or opinions stated--including pertinent commercial or other sources of funding for the individual author(s) or for the associated department(s) or organization(s), personal relationships, or direct academic competition. When considering whether a conflicting interest or connection should be disclosed, please consider the conflict of interest test: Is there any arrangement that would embarrass you or any of your co-authors if it was to emerge after publication and you had not declared it? If the manuscript is published, conflict of interest information, including if none was declared, will be communicated in a statement in the published paper. Any changes made to the list of conflicts after the paper is accepted must be submitted in writing, signed by the appropriate authors (that is, the corresponding author and the author for whom the conflict exists), to the JDSM editorial office.

In order to reproduce any third-party material (including tables, figures, or images) in an article authors must obtain permission from the copyright holder and be compliant with any requirements the copyright holder may have pertaining to this reuse. When seeking to reproduce any kind of third-party material authors should request the following:

  • non-exclusive rights to reproduce the material in the specified article and journal;
  • print and electronic rights, preferably for use in any form or medium;
  • the right to use the material for the life of the work; and
  • world-wide English-language rights.

It is particularly important to clear permission for use in both the print and online versions of the journal. JDSM is not able to accept permissions which carry a time limit because articles are retained permanently in the online journal archive.