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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • Title page: The first page should include: title of paper, list of all authors with full given and family names, addresses of all authors, and name of corresponding author with email address. The title should be short and descriptive, and less than 250 characters in length (including spaces). All individual disclosures of conflict of interest of all co-authors shall also be indicated on this page.
  • Manuscript main document: The main manuscript should not include any information regarding the authors. Add line numbers to the document for the convenience of reviewers’ commenting. Please refer to Author Guidelines for more information.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.

Author Guidelines

  • Manuscripts should be prepared according to the following order:
  1. Title page: The first page should include: title of paper, list of all authors with full given and family names, addresses of all authors, and name of corresponding author with email address. The title should be short and descriptive, and less than 250 characters in length (including spaces). All individual disclosures of conflict of interest of all co-authors shall also be indicated on this page.
  2. Manuscript main document: The main manuscript should not include any information regarding the authors. Add line numbers to the document for the convenience of reviewers’ commenting.
    1. Title: Title of the submitted work as above.
    2. Abstract:It should not be more than 250 words (Original research and review articles) and not more than 150 words (case reports, and clinical audits). Structured abstracts should follow (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Conclusion).
    3. Key words: At the end of the abstract, authors should provide no more than 10 key words. Key words should be taken from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from Index Medicus.
    4. Main text: The main text should be written in clear and simple English and divided into sections as follows:
      1. Introduction: no subsections
      2. Materials and methods
      3. Results
      4. Discussion
      5. Conclusion
      6. Acknowledgements (if any)
      7. Declaration of conflicting interests
      8. Funding: a funding acknowledgement statement
      9. References
      10. Tables: Tables should be in an editable rather than image version. Tables must be edited with Word/Excel.
      11. Legends for figures
      12. Figures: Figures/photographs must be submitted as jpg or tif files with distinct characters and symbols at 500 dpi. Each figure must be numbered and correctly oriented. All reproduced material must have the written permission of the owner, and such permission must be stated in the legend. Figures and tables should be numbered and cited as Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, etc. in sequence.
      13. References: References must be listed in the numerical system (Vancouver). All references should be numbered sequentially [in square brackets] in the text and listed in the same numerical order in the reference section. The reference numbers must be finalized and the bibliography must be fully formatted before submission.