Submission guidelines

Our 3-step submission process 

  1. Before you submit

    Now you’ve identified a journal to submit to, there are a few things you should be familiar with before you submit.

    • Make sure you are submitting to the most suitable journal - Aims and scope
    • Understand the costs and funding options - Fees and funding
    • Make sure your manuscript is accurate and readable - Language editing services
    • Understand the copyright agreement - Copyright

  2. Ready to submit

    To give your manuscript the best chance of publication, follow these policies and formatting guidelines.

    • General formatting rules for all article types - Preparing your manuscript
    • Make sure your submission is complete - Prepare supporting information
    • Copyright and license agreement - Conditions of publication
    • Read and agree to our Editorial Policies - Editorial policies  

  3. Submit and promote

    After acceptance, we provide support so your article gains maximum impact in the scientific community and beyond.

    Please note that manuscript can only be submitted by an author of the manuscript and may not be submitted by a third party. 

    • Who decides whether my work will be accepted? - Peer-review policy
    • Want to submit to a different journal? - Manuscript transfers
    • Spreading the word - Promoting your publication

Submit manuscript

AJTES comes out two times a year, is open access, peer-reviewed journal that encompasses all aspects of clinical and basic research related to traumatic and non-traumatic emergency surgery and its allied subjects.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to: emergency surgery, acute care surgery, trauma surgery, intensive care, trauma management, and resuscitation. The journal is the official scientific publication of the is the official publication of the Albanian Society for Trauma and Emergency Surgery (ASTES) Tirana, Albania. The language of the journal is English.

Its mission is to open an interdisciplinary forum that allows for the scientific exchange between basic and clinical science related to pathophysiology, diagnostics, and treatment of traumatized patients. The journal covers all aspects of clinical management, operative treatment, and related research of traumatic injuries and non-traumatic emergency surgery.

Clinical and experimental papers on issues relevant to the improvement of trauma care are and non-traumatic emergency surgery published. Reviews, original articles, perspectives, opinions, and commentaries allow the appropriate presentation of major and minor topics.

The Albanian Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery invites articles not only from Albania but also from Europe and worldwide. The journal encourages scientific publications by national and international authors and applies a rigorous double-blind peer-review system according to international standards. Each paper submitted is scrutinized by two or three referees and a biostatistical consultant..

Article Processing Charge (APC)

The authors should note that costs are involved in every stage of the publication process, like manuscript handling blind-review, form submission to publication, copy-editing, typesetting, tagging and indexing of articles, internet expenses electronic composition and production, web-media charges of the final article on dedicated servers, electronic archiving to ensure global dissemination and administrative and overheads, and other recurring expenses, the author is asked to pay an article publication fee. The publication fee is obligatory for online publication.

AJTES has designed the Article Processing Charge (APC) in a very nominal and affordable manner such that it will be feasible and convenient for all the researchers to publish their eminent work without any barrier or obstacle. Please go through the below list regarding the processing charge.

AJTES charges a nominal Publication fee for this journal is EUR 200 for full-length articles and EUR 150 for case reports for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable. (Inclusive of all taxes) after the acceptance of article for publication.

Mode of Payment Bank:  

Account Details

  • Account Name: AJTES JOURNAL
  • Account Number: 902019123003047803
  • Bank Name: ALPHA BANK
  • CCY: EURO
  • IBAN: AL56902113640191230030478030
  • SWIFT Code - CRBAALTRXXX

*The article accepted for publication will be processed further towards publication after the payment of the publication fees.

Withdrawal Policy: An author is free to withdraw article at no charge within a week of its original submission. However, once peer review is completed and paper is accepted for publication, then Article will be processed for journal issue. Hence author(s) are requested to pay about 30% of the publishing fee for withdrawal of Article, as a compensation for the strenuous process involved in it. For any queries/ discussions regarding manuscript withdrawal/article processing fee, please contact us at: ajtes.editor@gmail.com

English

For editors and reviewers to accurately assess the work presented in your manuscript you need to ensure the English language is of sufficient quality to be understood. If you need help with writing in English you should consider:

Please note that the use of a language editing service is not a requirement for publication in the journal and does not imply or guarantee that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted.

  • Copyright on any open access article in a journal published by AJTES is retained by the author(s).
  • Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified.

Where an author is prevented from being the copyright holder (for instance in the case of US government employees or those of Commonwealth governments), minor variations may be required. In such cases the copyright line and license statement in individual articles will be adjusted, for example to state ‘© 2016 Crown copyright’. Authors requiring a variation of this type should AJTES Contact during or immediately after submission of their article. Changes to the copyright line cannot be made after publication of an article.

Exceptions to copyright policy

Our policy pages provide details concerning copyright and licensing for articles which were previously published under policies that are different from the above. For instance, occasionally AJTES may co‐publish articles jointly with other publishers, and different licensing conditions may then apply. In all such cases, however, access to these articles is free from fees or any other access restrictions.

Information specifically regarding permissions and reprints can be found here. Please contact us if there are questions.

  • Criteria

    World Journal of Emergency Surgery welcomes well-described reports of cases that include the following:

    • Unreported or unusual side effects or adverse interactions involving medications.
    • Unexpected or unusual presentations of a disease.
    • New associations or variations in disease processes.
    • Presentations, diagnoses and/or management of new and emerging diseases.
    • An unexpected association between diseases or symptoms.
    • An unexpected event in the course of observing or treating a patient.
    • Findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect.

    Case reports submitted to World Journal of Emergency Surgery should make a contribution to medical knowledge and must have educational value or highlight the need for a change in clinical practice or diagnostic/prognostic approaches. The journal will not consider case reports describing preventive or therapeutic interventions, as these generally require stronger evidence.

    Authors are encouraged to describe how the case report is rare or unusual as well as its educational and/or scientific merits in the covering letter that accompanies the submission of the manuscript.

    Preparing your manuscript

    The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

    Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

    Title page 

    The title page should:

    •  present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
      • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review, A case report etc."
      • or, for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
    • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors​​​​​​​
      • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
    •  indicate the corresponding author

    Abstract

    The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

    • Background: why the case should be reported and its novelty
    • Case presentation: a brief description of the patient’s clinical and demographic details, the diagnosis, any interventions and the outcomes
    • Conclusions: a brief summary of the clinical impact or potential implications of the case report

    Keywords 

    Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

    Background

    The Background section should explain the background to the case report or study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature.

    Case presentation

    This section should include a description of the patient’s relevant demographic details, medical history, symptoms and signs, treatment or intervention, outcomes and any other significant details.

    Discussion and Conclusions

    This should discuss the relevant existing literature and should state clearly the main conclusions, including an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.

    List of abbreviations

    If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

    Declarations

    All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

    • Ethics approval and consent to participate
    • Consent for publication
    • Availability of data and materials
    • Competing interests
    • Funding
    • Authors' contributions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Authors' information (optional)

    Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

    If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

    Ethics approval and consent to participate

    Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

    • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
    • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

    Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

    See our editorial policies for more information.

    If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Consent for publication

    If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

    You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

    See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

    If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Availability of data and materials

    All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

    Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
    • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
    • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
    • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

    More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

    BioMed Central also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


    Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

    With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

    The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

    If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

    Competing interests

    All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

    Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

    If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

    Funding

    All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

    Authors' contributions

    The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

    Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

    Acknowledgements

    Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

    Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

    If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

    Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

    Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

    Authors' information

    This section is optional.

    You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

    Footnotes

    Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

    Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

    Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

  • Criteria

    Commentaries are short, narrowly focused articles of contemporary interest and usually take one of two forms:

    • The first form is a discussion of an article or trial that was recently published or that is soon to be published, and that is interesting enough to warrant further comment or explanation. This type of commentary discusses specific issues within a subject area rather than the whole field, explains the implications of the article and puts it in context. Opinions are welcome as long as they are factually based.

    • The second form is more editorial in nature and covers an aspect of an issue that is relevant to the journal's scope, for example discussion of the impact of new technology on research and treatment.

    Preparing your manuscript

    The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

    Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

    Title page

    The title page should:

    • present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
      • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review"
      • or for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
    • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors​​​​​​​
      • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
    • indicate the corresponding author

    Abstract

    The Abstract should not exceed 350 words and should be structured with a background, main body of the abstract and short conclusion. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract.

    Keywords

    Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

    Background

    The Background section should explain the background to the article, its aims, a summary of a search of the existing literature and the issue under discussion.

    Main text

    This should contain the body of the article, and may also be broken into subsections with short, informative headings.

    Conclusions

    This should state clearly the main conclusions and include an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.

    List of abbreviations

    If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

    Declarations

    All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

    • Ethics approval and consent to participate
    • Consent for publication
    • Availability of data and materials
    • Competing interests
    • Funding
    • Authors' contributions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Authors' information (optional)

    Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

    If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

    Ethics approval and consent to participate

    Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

    • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
    • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

    Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

    See our editorial policies for more information.

    If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Consent for publication

    If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

    You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

    See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

    If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Availability of data and materials

    All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

    Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
    • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
    • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
    • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

    More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

    BioMed Central also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


    Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

    With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

    The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

    If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

    Competing interests

    All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

    Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

    If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

    Funding

    All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

    Authors' contributions

    The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

    Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

    Acknowledgements

    Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

    Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

    If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

    Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

    Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

    Authors' information

    This section is optional.

    You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

    Footnotes

    Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

    Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

    Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

     

  • Criteria

    Methodologies should present a new experimental or computational method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available. The method needs to have been well tested and ideally, but not necessarily, used in a way that proves its value.

    World Journal of Emergency Surgery strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. Please see Springer Nature’s information on recommended repositories.

    Preparing your manuscript

    The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

    Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information). 

    Title page

    The title page should:

    • present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design
    • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors​​​​​​​
      • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
    • indicate the corresponding author

    Abstract

    The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

    • Background: the context and purpose of the study
    • Results: the main findings
    • Conclusions: a brief summary and potential implications

    Keywords

    Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

    Background

    The Background section should explain the background to the study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature and why this study was necessary.

    Results

    This should include the findings of the study including, if appropriate, results of statistical analysis which must be included either in the text or as tables and figures.

    Discussion

    For research articles this section should discuss the implications of the findings in context of existing research and highlight limitations of the study. For study protocols and methodology manuscripts this section should include a discussion of any practical or operational issues involved in performing the study and any issues not covered in other sections.

    Conclusions

    This should state clearly the main conclusions and provide an explanation of the importance and relevance of the study to the field.

    Methods 

    The methods section should include:

    • the aim, design and setting of the study
    • the characteristics of participants or description of materials
    • a clear description of all processes, interventions and comparisons. Generic names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses
    • the type of statistical analysis used, including a power calculation if appropriate

    List of abbreviations

    If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations can be provided.

    Declarations

    All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

    • Ethics approval and consent to participate
    • Consent for publication
    • Availability of data and materials
    • Competing interests
    • Funding
    • Authors' contributions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Authors' information (optional)

    Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

    If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

    Ethics approval and consent to participate

    Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

    • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
    • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

    Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

    See our editorial policies for more information.

    If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Consent for publication

    If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

    You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

    See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

    If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Availability of data and materials

    All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

    Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
    • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
    • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
    • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

    More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

    BioMed Central also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


    Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

    With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

    The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

    If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

    Competing interests

    All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

    Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

    If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

    Funding

    All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

    Authors' contributions

    The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

    Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

    Acknowledgements

    Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

    Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

    If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

    Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

    Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

    Authors' information

    This section is optional.

    You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

    Footnotes

    Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

    Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

    Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

  • Criteria

    World Journal of Emergency Surgery strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. Please see Springer Nature’s information on recommended repositories.

    Preparing your manuscript

    The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

    Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

    Title page

    The title page should:

    • present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
      • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review"
      • or for non-clinical or non-research studies a description of what the article reports
    • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors​​​​​​​
      • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
    • indicate the corresponding author

    Abstract

    The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. Reports of randomized controlled trials should follow the CONSORT extension for abstracts. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

    • Background: the context and purpose of the study
    • Methods: how the study was performed and statistical tests used
    • Results: the main findings
    • Conclusions: brief summary and potential implications
    • Trial registration: If your article reports the results of a health care intervention on human participants, it must be registered in an appropriate registry and the registration number and date of registration should be in stated in this section. If it was not registered prospectively (before enrollment of the first participant), you should include the words 'retrospectively registered'. See our editorial policies for more information on trial registration

    Keywords

    Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

    Background

    The Background section should explain the background to the study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature and why this study was necessary or its contribution to the field.

    Methods

    The methods section should include:

    • the aim, design and setting of the study
    • the characteristics of participants or description of materials
    • a clear description of all processes, interventions and comparisons. Generic drug names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses
    • the type of statistical analysis used, including a power calculation if appropriate

    Results

    This should include the findings of the study including, if appropriate, results of statistical analysis which must be included either in the text or as tables and figures.

    Discussion

    This section should discuss the implications of the findings in context of existing research and highlight limitations of the study.

    Conclusions

    This should state clearly the main conclusions and provide an explanation of the importance and relevance of the study reported.

    List of abbreviations

    If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

    Declarations

    All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

    • Ethics approval and consent to participate
    • Consent for publication
    • Availability of data and materials
    • Competing interests
    • Funding
    • Authors' contributions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Authors' information (optional)

    Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

    If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

    Ethics approval and consent to participate

    Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

    • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
    • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

    Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

    See our editorial policies for more information.

    If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Consent for publication

    If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

    You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

    See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

    If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Availability of data and materials

    All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

    Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
    • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
    • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
    • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

    More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

    BioMed Central also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


    Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

    With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

    The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

    If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

    Competing interests

    All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

    Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

    If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

    Funding

    All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

    Authors' contributions

    The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

    Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

    Acknowledgements

    Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

    Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

    If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

    Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

    Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

    Authors' information

    This section is optional.

    You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

    Footnotes

    Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

    Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

    Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

     

  • Criteria

    Reviews provide comprehensive and authoritative coverage of a topic area.

    Key aims of reviews are to provide systematic and substantial coverage of mature subjects, evaluations of progress in specified areas, and/or critical assessments of emerging technologies.

    Preparing your manuscript

    The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

    Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

    Title page

    The title page should:

    • present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
      • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review"
      • or for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
    • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors​​​​​​​
      • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
    • indicate the corresponding author

    Abstract

    The Abstract should not exceed 350 words and should be structured with a background, main body of the abstract and short conclusion. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract.

    Keywords

    Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

    Background

    The Background section should explain the background to the article, its aims, a summary of a search of the existing literature and the issue under discussion.

    Main text

    This should contain the body of the article, and may also be broken into subsections with short, informative headings.

    Conclusions

    This should state clearly the main conclusions and include an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.

    List of abbreviations

    If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

    Declarations

    All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

    • Ethics approval and consent to participate
    • Consent for publication
    • Availability of data and materials
    • Competing interests
    • Funding
    • Authors' contributions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Authors' information (optional)

    Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

    If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

    Ethics approval and consent to participate

    Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

    • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
    • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

    Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

    See our editorial policies for more information.

    If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Consent for publication

    If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

    You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

    See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

    If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Availability of data and materials

    All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

    Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
    • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
    • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
    • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

    More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

    BioMed Central also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


    Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

    With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

    The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

    If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

    Competing interests

    All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

    Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

    If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

    Funding

    All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

    Authors' contributions

    The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

    Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

    Acknowledgements

    Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

    Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

    If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

    Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

    Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

    Authors' information

    This section is optional.

    You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

    Footnotes

    Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

    Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

    Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

     

  • Criteria

    Study protocols can be for proposed or ongoing research, and should provide a detailed account of the hypothesis, rationale and methodology of the study.

    Study protocols concerning proposed research will usually be published without peer review if the study has received ethics approval and a grant from a major funding body. Proof of both ethics and funding will be required and we recommend that authors provide the relevant documentation on submission. Study protocols without major external funding will be peer reviewed. Study protocols without ethical approval will generally not be considered.

    Protocols of randomized controlled trials should follow the CONSORT guidelines and must have a trial registration number included as the last line of the abstract, as described in our editorial policies.

    Preparing your manuscript

    The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

    Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

    Title page

    The title page should:

    • present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
      • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review"
      • or for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
    • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors​​​​​​​
      • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
    • indicate the corresponding author

    Abstract

    The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

    • Background: the context and purpose of the study
    • Methods: how the study will be performed
    • Discussion: a brief summary and potential implications
    • Trial registration: If your article reports the results of a health care intervention on human participants, it must be registered in an appropriate registry and the registration number and date of registration should be in stated in this section. If it was not registered prospectively (before enrollment of the first participant), you should include the words 'retrospectively registered'. See our editorial policies for more information on trial registration

    Keywords

    Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

    Background

    The Background section should explain the background to the study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature and why this study is necessary or its contribution to the field.

    Methods/Design

    The methods section should include:

    • the aim, design and setting of the study
    • the characteristics of participants or description of materials
    • a clear description of all processes, interventions and comparisons. Generic drug names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses
    • the type of statistical analysis used, including a power calculation if appropriate.

    Discussion

    This should include a discussion of any practical or operational issues involved in performing the study and any issues not covered in other sections.

    List of abbreviations

    If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

    Declarations

    All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

    • Ethics approval and consent to participate
    • Consent for publication
    • Availability of data and materials
    • Competing interests
    • Funding
    • Authors' contributions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Authors' information (optional)

    Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

    If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

    Ethics approval and consent to participate

    Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

    • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
    • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

    Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

    See our editorial policies for more information.

    If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Consent for publication

    If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

    You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

    See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

    If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Availability of data and materials

    All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

    Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
    • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
    • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
    • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

    More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

    BioMed Central also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


    Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

    With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

    The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

    If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

    Competing interests

    All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

    Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

    If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

    Funding

    All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

    Authors' contributions

    The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

    Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

    Acknowledgements

    Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

    Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

    If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

    Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

    Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

    Authors' information

    This section is optional.

    You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

    Footnotes

    Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

    Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

    Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

  • Please make sure you have the following information available before you submit your manuscript:

    Author information

    Full names and email addresses of all co-authors on your manuscript.

    Cover letter

    A cover letter that includes the following information, as well as any additional information requested in the instructions for your specific article type (see main manuscript section above):

    • An explanation of why your manuscript should be published in World Journal of Emergency Surgery
    • An explanation of any issues relating to journal policies
    • A declaration of any potential competing interests
    • Confirmation that all authors have approved the manuscript for submission
    • Confirmation that the content of the manuscript has not been published, or submitted for publication elsewhere (see our Duplicate publication policy)
    • If you are submitting a manuscript to a particular special issue, please refer to its specific name in your covering letter

    Peer reviewers

    You may suggest potential peer reviewers for your manuscript. If you wish to do so, please provide institutional email addresses where possible, or information which will help the Editor to verify the identity of the reviewer (for example an ORCID or Scopus ID). Intentionally falsifying information, for example, suggesting reviewers with a false name or email address, will result in rejection of your manuscript and may lead to further investigation in line with our misconduct policy.

    Excluding peer reviewers

    During submission you may enter details of anyone who you would prefer not to review your manuscript.

  • Copyright and license agreement

    During submission, you will need to accept and confirm the following conditions:

    • All authors of the manuscript have read and agreed to its content and are accountable for all aspects of the accuracy and integrity of the manuscript in accordance with ICMJE criteria
    • That the article is original, has not already been published in a journal, and is not currently under consideration by another journal
    • That you agree to the terms of the BioMed Central Copyright and License Agreement, which we strongly recommend you read and, where applicable, Open Data policy. For authors who are prevented from being the copyright holder (for instance where Crown Copyright applies or researchers are US government employees), BioMed Central can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. If this applies to you, please contact us and provide details of your situation.

    Article-processing charge
    An article-processing charge (APC) applies for each article accepted for publication in World Journal of Emergency Surgery . 

  • Criteria

    Book reviews are short articles (about 400 words) that are written by specialists and read by the general community. The aim of a Book review is to give a brief summary of the book's strengths and weaknesses and to evaluate the book's overall usefulness to the audience it is intended for.

    Here are some questions you might want to consider:

    Who is the book intended for and does it meet the intended audience's needs?
    What new information does it present and how might it affect the readers' practice?
    What evidence does it present and how convincing is it?
    Is the style, organization and size of the book appropriate for its purpose?
    Are there any studies, facts, or ideas the authors have neglected to consider?
    Would you like to make any further reading suggestions?
    And last but not least: Why should anybody read this book - or why should they not? Is it an important book?

    Preparing your manuscript

    The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

    Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

    Title page

    The title page should:

    • present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
      • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review"
      • or for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
    • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors​​​​​​​
      • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
    • indicate the corresponding author

    Abstract

    The abstract should briefly summarize the aim, findings or purpose of the article. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract.

    Keywords

    Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

    Main text

    This should contain the body of the article, and may also be broken into subsections with short, informative headings.

    List of abbreviations

    If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

    Declarations

    All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

    • Ethics approval and consent to participate
    • Consent for publication
    • Availability of data and materials
    • Competing interests
    • Funding
    • Authors' contributions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Authors' information (optional)

    Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

    If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

    Ethics approval and consent to participate

    Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

    • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
    • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

    Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

    See our editorial policies for more information.

    If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Consent for publication

    If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

    You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

    See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

    If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

    Availability of data and materials

    All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

    Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
    • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
    • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
    • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

    More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

    BioMed Central also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


    Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

    With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

    The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

    If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

    Competing interests

    All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

    Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

    If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

    Funding

    All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

    Authors' contributions

    The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

    Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

    Acknowledgements

    Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

    Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

    See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

    If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

    Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

    Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

    Authors' information

    This section is optional.

    You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

    Footnotes

    Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

    Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

    Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

     

  • Ethics and consent

    Ethics approval

    Research involving human participants, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement detailing this, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate, must appear in all manuscripts reporting such research. If a study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript (including the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption). Further information and documentation to support this should be made available to the Editor on request. Manuscripts may be rejected if the Editor considers that the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. In rare cases, the Editor may contact the ethics committee for further information.

    Retrospective ethics approval

    If a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing, retrospective ethics approval usually cannot be obtained and it may not be possible to consider the manuscript for peer review. The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the Editor's discretion.

    New clinical tools and procedures

    Authors reporting the use of a new procedure or tool in a clinical setting, for example as a technical advance or case report, must give a clear justification in the manuscript for why the new procedure or tool was deemed more appropriate than usual clinical practice to meet the patient’s clinical need. Such justification is not required if the new procedure is already approved for clinical use at the authors’ institution. Authors will be expected to have obtained ethics committee approval and informed patient consent for any experimental use of a novel procedure or tool where a clear clinical advantage based on clinical need was not apparent before treatment.

    Consent to participate

    For all research involving human participants, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript. For manuscripts reporting studies involving vulnerable groups (for example, unconscious patients) where there is the potential for coercion (for example prisoners) or where consent may not have been fully informed, manuscripts will be considered at the editor’s discretion and may be referred to an internal editorial oversight group for further scrutiny. Consent must be obtained for all forms of personally identifiable data including biomedical, clinical, and biometric data. In the case of articles describing human transplantation studies, authors must include a statement declaring that no organs/tissues were obtained from prisoners and must also name the institution(s)/clinic(s)/department(s) via which organs/tissues were obtained. Documentary evidence of consent must be supplied if requested.

    Research involving human embryos, gametes, and stem cells

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    Manuscripts that report experiments involving the use of human embryos and gametes, human embryonic stem cells and related materials, and clinical applications of stem cells must include confirmation that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations (See also Ethics and Consent)

    The manuscript should include an ethics statement identifying the institutional and/or national research ethics committee (including the name of the ethics committee) approving the experiments and describing any relevant details. Authors should confirm that informed consent (See also Ethics and Consent and Consent for publication) was obtained from all recipients and/or donors of cells or tissues, where necessary, and describe the conditions of donation of materials for research, such as human embryos or gametes. Copies of approval and redacted consent documents may be requested by the Editor.

    We encourage authors to follow the principles laid out in the 2016 ISSCR Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation.

    In deciding whether to publish papers describing modifications of the human germline, the Editors are guided by safety considerations, compliance with applicable regulations, as well as the status of the societal debate on the implications of such modifications for future generations. In case of concerns regarding a particular type of study the Editor may seek advice from the Springer Nature Research Integrity Group.

    The decision to publish a paper is the responsibility of the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal.

    Sex and gender in research (SAGER)

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    We encourage our authors to follow the ‘Sex and Gender Equity in Research – SAGER – guidelines’ and to include sex and gender considerations where relevant. Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms. Article titles and/or abstracts should indicate clearly what sex(es) the study applies to. Authors should also describe in the background, whether sex and/or gender differences may be expected; report how sex and/or gender were accounted for in the design of the study; provide disaggregated data by sex and/or gender, where appropriate; and discuss respective results. If a sex and/or gender analysis was not conducted, the rationale should be given in the Discussion. We suggest that our authors consult the full guidelines before submission.

    • Definition of Sex and Gender (taken from Office of Research in Women’s Health, NIH).
    • Sex - refers to biological differences between females and males, including chromosomes, sex organs, and endogenous hormonal profiles.
    • Gender-  refers to socially constructed and enacted roles and behaviors which occur in a historical and cultural context and vary across societies and over time.
    • Applications of the guidelines: These guidelines apply to studies involving humans,  vertebrate animal and cell lines.

    Research involving animals

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    Experimental research on vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The Basel Declaration outlines fundamental principles to adhere to when conducting research in animals and the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) has also published ethical guidelines.

    A statement detailing compliance with relevant guidelines (e.g. the revised Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 in the UK and Directive 2010/63/EU in Europe) and/or ethical approval (including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate) must be included in the manuscript. If a study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript (including the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption and the reasons for the exemption). The Editor will take account of animal welfare issues and reserves the right to reject a manuscript, especially if the research involves protocols that are inconsistent with commonly accepted norms of animal research. In rare cases, the Editor may contact the ethics committee for further information.

    Manuscripts presenting studies that have employed anesthesia or euthanasia methods inconsistent with the commonly accepted norms of veterinary best practice (e.g. chloral hydrate, ether, and chloroform) will not be considered. Decisions to not consider manuscripts presenting such anesthesia or euthanasia methods are independent of the approving ethics committee and any previously published work. We recommend that authors consult the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) Guidelines for the Euthanasia of Animals (2020), as a comprehensive resource for guidance on veterinary best practice for the anesthesia and euthanasia of animals.

    For experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also document informed consent from the client or owner and adherence to a high standard (best practice) of veterinary care.

    Field studies and other non-experimental research on animals must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement detailing compliance with relevant guidelines and/or appropriate permissions or licences must be included in the manuscript. We recommend that authors comply with the IUCN Policy Statement on Research Involving Species at Risk of Extinction  and the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

     

     

    Research involving plants

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    Experimental research and field studies on plants (either cultivated or wild), including the collection of plant material, must comply with relevant institutional, national, and international guidelines and legislation.  

    Manuscripts should include a statement specifying the appropriate permissions and/or licences for collection of plant or seed specimens. We recommend that authors comply with the IUCN Policy Statement on Research Involving Species at Risk of Extinction and the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

    To support reproducibility, voucher specimens for all wild plants described in a manuscript must be deposited in a public herbarium or other public collection that provides access to deposited material. Information on the voucher specimen and who identified it must be included in the manuscript.

    Biosafety and biosecurity

    It is expected that research submitted to any BMC journal is carried out in compliance with relevant institutional biosafety and biosecurity protocols and any national or international recommendations relevant to the research field. For example, for life sciences research, the WHO information DURC for life sciences research. Researchers are expected to be aware of dual-use concerns related to their work and take steps to minimise misuse of their work. Where submitted research is deemed to present a potential dual-use risk, the Editor may ask authors to provide details of how such a risk has been mitigated and how it complies with their institutional and funder’s requirements, as well as any national regulations.  We reserve the right to take expert advice in cases where we believe that concerns may arise and may require a manuscript to undergo peer review specifically to assess the dual use risk. Thus, authors may be asked to revise their manuscript before normal journal peer-review.

    We recognize the widespread view that openness in science helps to alert society to potential threats and to defend against them, and we anticipate that only very rarely (if at all) will the risks be perceived as outweighing the benefits of publishing a paper that has otherwise been deemed appropriate for publication. Once a decision has been reached, authors will be informed if biosecurity advice has informed that decision.

    Standards for research in complementary and alternative medicine

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    Springer Nature journals are committed to evidence-based research. We believe that Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) research should be held to the same standards and evidence threshold as those of medicine research.

    We welcome manuscripts for submission which meet the following clinical research standards:

    • Clinical research manuscripts that comply with international and national standards for such work (such as the Declaration of Helsinki or relevant Governmental regulation e.g. the UK’s The Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations). 
    • Studies which are adequately controlled (be that compared to a placebo or conventional medicine), blinded (where appropriate), randomised and of sufficient statistical power to confidentially and accurately interpret the effect reported.  Studies reporting a CAM treatment/technique compared only to another CAM treatment/technique are not sufficient to test the efficacy of the CAM treatment in question. Studies in which a conventional treatment is supplemented with a CAM technique are only valid if compared to the same conventional treatment supplemented with a placebo.
    • CAM treatments/techniques tested on animal models and/or human patients: It is unethical for such work, on humans or animals, to have taken place without adequate prior evidence that the treatment/technique shows some potential of being therapeutic.  Manuscripts must include evidence that takes the form of objective, measurable data from previously published peer reviewed literature which adheres to scientific principles (for instance in vitro or cellular work). Other forms of evidence are not valid. Manuscripts describing work lacking this evidence will not be considered on ethical grounds.

    Consent for publication

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    For all manuscripts that include details, images, or videos relating to an individual person, written informed consent for the publication of these details must be obtained from that person (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 18). The consent must be for publication of their details under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (such that they will be freely available on the internet). If the person has died, consent for publication must be obtained from their next of kin. The manuscript must include a statement that written informed consent for publication was obtained. 

    Authors can use the BMC consent form to obtain consent for publication, or a consent form from their own institution or region if appropriate. The consent form must state that the details/images/videos will be freely available on the internet and may be seen by the general public. The consent form must be made available to the Editor if requested, and will be treated confidentially.

    In cases where images are entirely unidentifiable and there are no details on individuals reported within the manuscript, consent for publication of images may not be required. The final decision on whether consent to publish is required lies with the Editor.

     

    Trial registration

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    BMC supports initiatives to improve reporting of clinical trials. This includes prospective registration of clinical trials in suitable publicly available databases. In line with ICMJE guidelines, BMC requires registration of all clinical trials that are reported in manuscripts submitted to its journals.

    The ICMJE uses the World Health Organization (WHO) definition of a clinical trial, which is "any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes". This definition includes phase I to IV trials. The ICMJE defines health-related interventions as "any intervention used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome" and health-related outcomes as "any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants". Authors who are unsure whether their trial needs registering should consult the ICMJE FAQs for further information.

    Suitable publicly available registries are those listed on the ICMJE website as well as any of the primary registries that participate in the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, including the ISRCTN registry, which is administered and published by BMC.

    The trial registration number (TRN) and date of registration should be included as the last line of the manuscript abstract.

    For clinical trials that have not been registered prospectively, BMC encourages retrospective registration to ensure the complete publication of all results. Further information on retrospective registration is available from the AllTrials campaign, the Public Accounts Committee and the Department of Health.

    Many journals published by BMC will consider manuscripts describing retrospectively registered studies. The TRN, date of registration and the words 'retrospectively registered’ should be included as the last line of the manuscript abstract.

    Registration of systematic reviews

    BMC supports the prospective registration of systematic reviews and encourages authors to register their systematic reviews in a suitable registry (such as PROSPERO). Authors who have registered their systematic review should include the registration number as the last line of the manuscript abstract.

     

    Availability of data and materials

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    Submission of a manuscript to a BMC journal implies that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality.

    For all journals, BMC strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers, and where there is a community established norm for data sharing, BMC mandates data deposition (for data types with required deposition, see below). 

    We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files, in machine-readable format (such as spreadsheets rather than PDFs) whenever possible. Please see the list of recommended repositories. For several journals, deposition of the data on which the conclusions of the manuscript rely is required. Please check the individual journal’s Submission Guidelines for more information.

    Authors who need help understanding our data sharing policies, finding a suitable data repository, or organising and sharing research data can access our Author Support portal for additional guidance.

    Availability of data and materials section

    All authors must include an “Availability of Data and Materials” section in their manuscript detailing where the data supporting their findings can be found. Authors who do not wish to share their data must state that data will not be shared, and give the reason.

    Availability of data and materials statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
    • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
    • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
    • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
    • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
    • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

    BMC endorses the Force 11 Data Citation Principles and requires that all publicly available datasets be fully referenced in the reference list with an accession number or unique identifier such as a digital object identifier (DOI).

    List of recommended repositories

    A list of recommended repositories by subject area and data type can be found on the Springer Nature Recommended Repositories list.

    Community-established norm of data deposition

    Mandatory deposition Suitable repositories

    Protein sequences

    		 Uniprot

    DNA and RNA sequences

    Genbank

    DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ)

    EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (ENA)

    DNA and RNA sequencing data

    NCBI Trace Archive

    NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) 

    Genetic polymorphisms

    dbSNP

     

    dbVar

     

    European Variation Archive (EVA)

    Linked genotype and phenotype data

    dbGAP

     

    The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA)

    Macromolecular structure

    Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB)

     

    Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BMRB)

    Microarray data (must be MIAME compliant)

    Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO)

     

    ArrayExpress

    Crystallographic data for small molecules

    		 Cambridge Structural Database

     

    Publication of clinical datasets

    For datasets containing clinical data, authors have an ethical and legal responsibility to respect participants’ rights to privacy and to protect their identity. Ideally, authors should gain informed consent for publication of the dataset from participants at the point of recruitment to the trial. If this is not possible, authors must demonstrate that publication of such data does not compromise anonymity or confidentiality or breach local data protection laws, for the dataset to be considered for publication. Authors must consider whether the dataset contains any direct or indirect identifiers (see here for further information) and consult their local ethics committee or another appropriate body before submission if there is any possibility that participants will not be fully anonymous. Authors must state in their manuscript on submission whether informed consent was obtained for publication of patient data. If informed consent was not obtained, authors must state the reason for this, and which body was consulted in the preparation of the dataset.

     

     

    Software and code

    Any previously unreported software application or custom code described in the manuscript should be available for testing by reviewers in a way that preserves their anonymity. The manuscript should include a description in the Availability of Data and Materials section of how the reviewers can access the unreported software application or custom code. This section should include a link to the most recent version of your software or code (e.g. GitHub or Sourceforge) as well as a link to the archived version referenced in the manuscript. The software or code should be archived in an appropriate repository with a DOI or other unique identifier. For software in GitHub, we recommend using Zenodo. If published, the software application/tool should be readily available to any scientist wishing to use it for non-commercial purposes, without restrictions (such as the need for a material transfer agreement). If the implementation is not made freely available, then the manuscript should focus clearly on the development of the underlying method and not discuss the tool in any detail.

    Standards of reporting

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    BMC advocates complete and transparent reporting of biomedical and biological research. Please refer to the Minimum standards of reporting checklist when reporting your research (published in BMC Biology). Exact requirements may vary depending on the journal; please refer to the journal’s submission guidelines. We also strongly recommend that authors refer to the minimum reporting guidelines for health research hosted by the EQUATOR Network when preparing their manuscript, and FAIRsharing.org for reporting checklists for biological and biomedical research, where applicable. Authors should adhere to these guidelines when drafting their manuscript, and peer reviewers will be asked to refer to these checklists when evaluating such studies.

    Checklists are available for a number of study designs, including:

     

    *Authors of systematic reviews should also provide a link to an additional file from the ‘methods’ section, which reproduces all details of the search strategy. For an example of how a search strategy should be presented, see the Cochrane Reviewers' Handbook.

     

    Statistical methods

    Authors should include full information on the statistical methods and measures used in their research, including justification of the appropriateness of the statistical test used (see the SAMPL guidelines for more information). Reviewers will be asked to check the statistical methods, and the manuscript may be sent for specialist statistical review if considered necessary.

     

    Resource identification

    To enable effective tracking of the key resources used to produce the scientific findings reported in the biomedical literature, authors are expected to include a full description of all resources with enough information to allow them to be uniquely identified. In support of the Resource Identification Initiative (RII), we encourage authors to use unique Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) within their manuscript to identify their model organisms, antibodies, or tools.

    Cell line authentication

    If human cell lines are used, authors are strongly encouraged to include the following information in their manuscript:

    • The source of the cell line, including when and from where it was obtained
    • Whether the cell line has recently been authenticated and by what method
    • Whether the cell line has recently been tested for mycoplasma contamination

    Further information is available from the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC). We recommend that authors check the NCBI database for misidentification and contamination of human cell lines.

    Gene nomenclature

    Standardized gene nomenclature should be used throughout. Human gene symbols and names can be found in the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) database; requests for new gene symbols should be submitted here and any enquiries about gene nomenclature can be directed here. Alternative gene aliases that are commonly used may also be reported, but should not be used alone in place of the HGNC symbol. Nomenclature committees for other species are listed here.

    Reporting of sequence variants

    We endorse the recommendations of the Human Variome Project Consortium for describing sequence variants (Human Genome Variation Society) and phenotypes (Human Phenotype Ontology).

    We recommend that authors should submit all variants described in a manuscript to the relevant public gene/disease specific database (LSDB): a list is available here. The database URL and the unique identifier should be reported in the manuscript.

    Data

    To drive the maximum re-use and utility of published research, we expect authors to comply with available field-specific standards for the preparation and recording of data. Please see the BioSharing website for information on field-specific data standards. Authors must comply with best practice in their field for sharing of data, with particular attention to maintaining patient confidentiality.

    Authors using unpublished genomic data are expected to abide by the guidelines of the Fort Lauderdale and Toronto agreements. Based on broadly accepted scientific community standards, the key requirement of third parties using genomic data is to contact the owners of unpublished data (i.e. the principal investigator and sequencing centre) prior to undertaking their research, to advise them about their planned analyses.

    Digital image integrity

    Adapted from the Journal of Cell Biology and from Nature Research.

    While a certain degree of image processing is unavoidable for some experiments, fields and techniques, in all instances, the final image presented in the published article must accurately represent the original data and conform to community standards. The guidelines on image processing presented below will aid in accurate data presentation; authors must also take care to exercise caution during data acquisition to avoid misrepresentation of the data collected.

    Authors should list all image acquisition tools and image processing software packages used, noting the specific version of the software. If the data were processed with custom code, this should be fully described and deposited into a community repository. All image-gathering settings and processing manipulations should be fully described in the methods.

    When preparing figures for publication, adhere to the following guidelines:

    • Images gathered at different times or from different locations should not be combined into a single image, unless it is stated that the resultant image is a product of time-averaged data or a time-lapse sequence. If juxtaposing images is essential, the borders should be clearly demarcated in the figure and described in the legend.
    • Touch-up tools, such as cloning and healing tools in Photoshop, or any feature that deliberately obscures manipulations, should not be used.
    • Processing (such as changing brightness and contrast) is appropriate only when it is applied equally across the entire image and is applied equally to controls. Contrast should not be adjusted so that data disappear. Excessive manipulations, such as processing to emphasize one region in the image at the expense of others (e.g. through the use of a biased choice of threshold settings), are inappropriate, as is emphasizing experimental data relative to the control.
    • Authors should be prepared to submit original, unprocessed images on request.

    Electrophoretic gels and blots

    The display of cropped gels and blots in the main paper is allowed if it improves the clarity and conciseness of the presentation. In such cases, the cropping must be mentioned in the figure legend. For some BMC journals, the inclusion of the original, uncropped gel or blot is mandatory and  the full length original blot or gel should be included in the additional files.

    • Quantitative comparisons between samples on different gels/blots are discouraged; if this is unavoidable, the figure legend must state that the samples derive from the same experiment and that gels/blots were processed in parallel. Vertically sliced images that juxtapose lanes that were non-adjacent in the gel must have a clear separation or a black line delineating the boundary between the gels. Loading controls must be run on the same blot.
    • Cropped gels in the paper must retain important bands.
    • High-contrast gels and blots are discouraged, as overexposure may mask additional bands. Authors should strive for exposures with gray backgrounds. Multiple exposures should be presented in Supplementary Information if high contrast is unavoidable. Immunoblots should be surrounded by a black line to indicate the borders of the blot, if the background is faint.
    • For quantitative comparisons, appropriate reagents, controls and imaging methods with linear signal ranges should be used.

    Microscopy

    Authors should be prepared to supply the journal with original data on request, at the resolution collected, from which their images were generated. Cells from multiple fields should not be juxtaposed in a single field; instead multiple supporting fields of cells should be shown as Supplementary Information.

    • Adjustments should be applied to the entire image. Threshold manipulation, expansion or contraction of signal ranges and the altering of high signals should be avoided. If 'pseudo-colouring' and nonlinear adjustment (e.g. 'gamma changes') are used, this must be disclosed. Adjustments of individual colour channels are sometimes necessary on 'merged' images, but this should be noted in the figure legend.
    • In the methods, specify the type of equipment (microscopes/objective lenses, cameras, detectors, filter model and batch number) and acquisition software used. Although we appreciate that there is some variation between instruments, equipment settings for critical measurements should also be listed. In addition, processing software should be named and manipulations indicated (such as type of deconvolution, three-dimensional reconstructions, surface and volume rendering, 'gamma changes', filtering, thresholding and projection).
    • Authors should state the measured resolution at which an image was acquired and any downstream processing or averaging that enhances the resolution of the image.

    Describing new taxa

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    Algal, fungal, and botanical names

    Since January 2012, the electronic publication of algal, fungal, and botanical names has been a valid form of publication. Manuscripts containing new taxon names or other nomenclatural acts must follow the guidelines set by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. Further helpful information by Sandra Knapp et al. is available here.

    Authors describing new fungal taxa should register the names with a recognized repository, such as Mycobank, and request a unique digital identifier which should be included in the published article.

    Zoological names

    Since January 2012, electronic publication of zoological names has been a valid form of publication if certain conditions are met. Manuscripts containing new taxon names or other nomenclatural acts must follow the guidelines set by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. We require the new taxon name and the article it is published in to be registered with ZooBank. The unique identifier provided by ZooBank should be included in the published article. Authors will be able to update ZooBank with the final citation following publication. Further helpful information by Frank-T. Krell is available here.

    Bacterial names

    In accordance with the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICNP) effective publication of new prokaryotic names in electronic journals is possible. In order to comply with rules of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP) for valid publication authors must submit a copy of the published article in its final form, together with certificates of deposition of the type strain (for unrestricted distribution), in at least two internationally recognized, publicly accessible culture collections located in different countries, to the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) editorial office. Following review by the List Editor, effectively published names that conform to all of the rules of the ICNP will appear on a subsequent Validation List, in the order received, thereby becoming validly published.

    Virus names

    The proposal of new virus names must follow the guidelines established by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) in the International Code of Virus Classification and Nomenclature. Proposals for new virus taxa should be forwarded to the relevant Study Group of the ICTV for consideration.

     

    Competing interests

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    BMC requires authors to declare all competing interests in relation to their work. All submitted manuscripts must include a ‘competing interests’ section at the end of the manuscript listing all competing interests (financial and non-financial). Where authors have no competing interests, the statement should read “The author(s) declare(s) that they have no competing interests”. The Editor may ask for further information relating to competing interests.

    Editors and reviewers are also required to declare any competing interests and may be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists.

    What constitutes a competing interest?

    Competing interests may be financial or non-financial. A competing interest exists when the authors’ interpretation of data or presentation of information may be influenced by, or may be perceived to be influenced by, their personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations. Authors should disclose any financial competing interests but also any non-financial competing interests that may cause them embarrassment if they were to become public after the publication of the manuscript.

    Financial competing interests

    Financial competing interests include (but are not limited to):

    • Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of the manuscript, either now or in the future.
    • Holding stocks or shares in an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of the manuscript, either now or in the future.
    • Holding, or currently applying for, patents relating to the content of the manuscript.
    • Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript.

    Non-financial competing interests

    Non-financial competing interests include (but are not limited to) political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, and intellectual competing interests. If, after reading these guidelines, you are unsure whether you have a competing interest, please contact info@biomedcentral.com.

    Commercial organizations

    Authors from pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that sponsor clinical trials, should declare these as competing interests on submission. They should also adhere to the Good Publication Practice guidelines for pharmaceutical companies (GPP3), 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. BMC will not publish advertorial content.

    Authorship

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    Authorship provides credit for a researcher’s contributions to a study and carries accountability. Authors are expected to fulfil the criteria below (adapted from McNutt et al.,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb 2018, 201715374; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1715374115; licensed under CC BY 4.0):

    Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception OR design of the work; OR the acquisition, analysis, OR interpretation of data; OR the creation of new software used in the work; OR have drafted the work or substantively revised it

    AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author's contribution to the study);

    AND to have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author's own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature.

    BMC journals encourage collaboration with colleagues in the locations where the research is conducted, and expect their inclusion as co-authors when they fulfill all authorship criteria described above. Contributors who do not meet all criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.

    Please see individual journal's Submission Guidelines for information on the format for listing author contributions.

    Authors wishing to make changes to authorship will be asked to complete our change of authorship form. Please note that changes to authorship cannot be made after acceptance of a manuscript.

    Corresponding authors

    Corresponding authors are responsible for ensuring that all listed authors have approved the manuscript before submission, including the names and order of authors, and that all authors receive the submission and all substantive correspondence with editors, as well as the full reviews, verifying that all data, figures, materials (including reagents), and code, even those developed or provided by other authors, comply with the transparency and reproducibility standards of both the field and journal.

    This responsibility includes but is not limited to: (i) ensuring that original data/original figures/materials/code upon which the submission is based are preserved following best practices in the field so that they are retrievable for reanalysis; (ii) confirming that data/figures/materials/code presentation accurately reflects the original; and (iii) foreseeing and minimizing obstacles to the sharing of data/materials/code described in the work. The corresponding author should be responsible for managing these requirements across the author group and ensuring that the entire author group is fully aware of and in compliance with best practices in the discipline of publication.

    To discourage ghost authorship, corresponding authors must reveal as appropriate whether the manuscript benefited from the use of editorial services that, if unacknowledged, might constitute an undisclosed conflict of interest. Examples include use of an editor from an organization that may have a vested interest in slanting the results or reliance on a technical writer at a level that would warrant authorship credit. These situations might variously be addressed by including a statement in the acknowledgments, by describing the effort in the methods section, or by adding an author.

    The involvement of scientific (medical) writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be acknowledged, along with their source of funding, as described in the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) guidelines. The role of medical writers should be acknowledged explicitly in the ‘Acknowledgements’ or ‘Authors’ contributions’ section as appropriate.

    Corresponding authors should indicate whether any authors on earlier versions have been removed or new authors added and why. It is incumbent on the corresponding author to ensure that all authors (or group/laboratory leaders in large collaborations) have certified the author list and contribution description: that all authors who deserve to be credited on the manuscript are indeed identified, that no authors are listed who do not deserve authorship credit, and that author contributions, where they are provided, are expressed accurately.

    Any potential authorship disputes brought to the editors’ attention will be handled in line with COPE guidelines.

    Acknowledgements

    All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an ‘Acknowledgements’ section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help or writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support.

    Third party submissions

    All manuscripts must be submitted by an author and may not be submitted by a third party.

    Citations

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    Research articles and non-research articles (e.g. Opinion, Review, and Commentary articles) must cite appropriate and relevant literature in support of the claims made. Excessive self-citation, coordinated efforts among several authors to collectively self-cite, gratuitous and unnecessary citation of articles published in the journal to which the paper has been submitted, and any other form of citation manipulation are inappropriate. 

    Citation manipulation will result in the article being rejected, and may be reported to authors’ institutions.  Similarly, any attempts by peer-reviewers or editors to encourage such practices should be reported by authors to the publisher. 

    • Authors should consider the following guidelines when preparing their manuscript: 
    • Any statement in the manuscript that relies on external sources of information (i.e. not the authors' own new ideas or findings or general knowledge) should use a citation.
    • Authors should avoid citing derivations of original work. For example, they should cite the original work rather than a review article that cites an original work.
    • Authors should ensure that their citations are accurate (i.e. they should ensure the citation supports the statement made in their manuscript and should not misrepresent another work by citing it if it does not support the point the authors wish to make).
    • Authors should not cite sources that they have not read.
    • Authors should not preferentially cite their own or their friends’, peers’, or institution’s publications.
    • Authors should avoid citing work solely from one country.
    • Authors should not use an excessive number of citations to support one point.
    • Ideally, authors should cite sources that have undergone peer review where possible.
    • Authors should not cite advertisements or advertorial material.

    Preprint sharing and citation

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    BMC journals encourage posting of preprints of primary research manuscripts on preprint servers, authors’ or institutional websites, and open communications between researchers whether on community preprint servers or preprint commenting platforms. Preprints are defined as an author’s version of a research manuscript prior to formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server (as described in Preprints for the life sciences. Science 352, 899–901; 2016); preprints may be posted at any time during the peer review process. Posting of preprints is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at BMC journals. Manuscripts posted on preprint servers will not be taken into account when determining the advance provided by a study under consideration at a BMCjournal.

    Our policy on posting, licensing, citation of preprints and communications with the media about preprints of primary research manuscripts is summarized below.

    Authors should disclose details of preprint posting, including DOI and licensing terms, upon submission of the manuscript or at any other point during consideration at a BMC journal. Once the preprint is published, it is the author’s responsibility to ensure that the preprint record is updated with a publication reference, including the DOI and a URL link to the published version of the article on the journal website.

    Authors may choose any license of their choice for the preprint including Creative Commons licenses. The type of CC-license chosen will affect how the preprint may be shared and reused. More information to help guide licensing choices can be found in these resource documents developed by an ASAPbio licensing taskforce.

    Preprints may be cited in the reference list of articles under consideration at BMC journals as shown below:

    Babichev, S. A., Ries, J. & Lvovsky, A. I. Quantum scissors: teleportation of single-mode optical states by means of a nonlocal single photon. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0208066 (2002).

    Authors posting preprints are asked to respect our policy on communications with the media. Researchers may respond to requests from the media in response to a preprint or conference presentation by providing explanation or clarification of the work, or information about its context. In these circumstances, media coverage will not hinder editorial handling of the submission. Researchers should be aware however that such coverage may reduce or pre-empt coverage by other media at the time of publication. We also advise that researchers approached by reporters in response to a preprint make it clear that the paper has not yet undergone peer review, that the findings are provisional and that the conclusions may change.

    Information about our self-archiving policies and release of Author’s Accepted Manuscript may be found here.

    Duplicate publication

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    Any manuscript submitted to a BMC journal must be original and the manuscript, or substantial parts of it, must not be under consideration by any other journal. In any case where there is the potential for overlap or duplication we require that authors are transparent. Authors should declare any potentially overlapping publications on submission. Any overlapping publications should be cited. Any ‘in press’ or unpublished manuscript cited, or relevant to the Editor’s and reviewers' assessment of the manuscript, should be made available if requested by the Editor. BMC reserves the right to judge potentially overlapping or redundant publications on a case-by-case basis.

    In general, the manuscript should not already have been formally published in any journal or in any other citable form. If justified and made clear upon submission, there are exceptions to this rule. Details of these exceptions follow below and are also summarized in table 1.

    BMC is a member of CrossCheck’s plagiarism detection initiative and takes seriously all cases of publication misconduct. Any suspected cases of covert duplicate manuscript submission will be handled as outlined in the COPE guidelines and the Editor may contact the authors’ institution (see Misconduct policy for more information). BMC endorses the policies of the ICMJE in relation to overlapping publications.

    Complete manuscripts

     

    Cochrane systematic reviews

    BMC does not currently have a co-publication agreement with the Cochrane Library for its systematic reviews. BMC will therefore only consider publishing novel Cochrane systematic reviews, or updated versions of articles in the Cochrane Library, if they provide substantial new information.

    Co-publication in multiple journals

    If transparent, and with prior agreement of the relevant journals and under the conditions specified in the ICMJE guidelines, co-publication in multiple journals will be considered at the Editor's discretion.

    Health technology assessment

    The reports of the NHS Health Technology Assessment (HTA) programme are freely accessible in full online. At the Editor's discretion, some BMC journals will consider full or shortened versions of these articles for peer review.

    Preprint servers and author/institutional repositories

    Posting a manuscript on a preprint server or an author's personal or institutional website does not constitute previous publication.  Please see our preprint sharing and citation policy for further information. 

    BMC encourages self-archiving by authors of manuscripts accepted for publication in its journals.

    Theses

    BMC will consider submissions containing material that has previously formed part of a PhD or other academic thesis including those that have been made publicly available according to the requirements of the institution awarding the qualification.

    Translations into English

    Authors should comply with the ICMJE guidelines and seek approval from the original publisher to check that they do not breach the copyright terms of the original publication and that the original publisher gives permission for publication of the translation under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.

    Incomplete manuscripts

    Abridged articles

    At the Editor's discretion, some BMC journals will consider manuscripts that are substantially extended versions of articles that have previously been published in another peer-reviewed journal. In such cases the prior publication of an abridged version of the article would therefore not preclude publication, provided the new manuscript represents a substantially novel contribution to the scientific record. If applicable, the authors should seek approval from the original publisher before submitting the extended version of the manuscript.

    Abstracts/posters

    Prior abstracts of up to 400 words and posters presented at, or published as part of, academic meetings do not preclude consideration for peer review of a full manuscript, as the full manuscript represents a formal advance to the citable scientific record. Published abstracts should be cited. Authors should be aware that many conference proceedings exceed the allowable word limit and constitute a citable form.

    Datasets

    Making scientific data sets publicly available before associated manuscripts are submitted will not preclude consideration by a BMC journal. Because an increasing number of research funding agencies require that their grant holders share the 'raw data' research outputs, such data sharing is encouraged by BMC, provided appropriate safeguards are in place to protect personal or sensitive information. See the policy on publication of clinical datasets (above) for more information.

    Non-research articles

    Authors of non-research articles (usually commissioned reviews and commentaries) can include figures and tables that have been previously published in other journals provided they confirm on submission that permission has been obtained from the original publisher (if applicable) and cite the original article. Documentary evidence to support this permission must be made available to the Editor on request.

    In order to avoid the potential for self-plagiarism, inadvertently or otherwise, authors agreeing to write commissioned articles should notify the Editor of any recent publications or invitations to write on a similar topic.

    Open science

    If authors have previously discussed or posted their own data in venues such as blogs, wikis, social networking websites, or online electronic lab notebooks, they are still able to submit their findings to BMC's journals. However, given the rapidly evolving nature of these resources, where discussion of data or manuscripts posted to these venues has subsequently been incorporated into the manuscript, the Editor will make their own assessment as to whether there may be duplication in the submitted manuscript.

    Study protocols

    Publication of study protocols reduces the risk of non-publication of research findings and facilitates methodological discussion, and is encouraged by a number of BMC journals. Therefore prior publication of a study protocol before submission of a manuscript reporting the results is not considered duplicate publication.

    Summary clinical trial results in public registries

    Posting of summary clinical trial results in publicly accessible databases is generally not considered duplicate publication. BMC requires authors of manuscripts reporting clinical trials to have registered their trial in a suitably accessible registry (see our Trial Registration policy for more information). In the US, submission of trial results to ClinicalTrials.gov is a statutory requirement. More information on this requirement can be found here.

     

    Table 1. Generally permissible and non-permissible forms of duplicate/overlapping publication

    Previous publication/deposition Guidance on permissibility

     Abridged articles

    At the Editor's discretion, provided there is agreement from the original journal/publisher and the original publication is cited

    Abstracts up to 400 words or posters presented at scientific meetings

    Yes - published abstracts should be cited

    Co-publication in multiple journals

    At the Editor's discretion and with conditions, as outlined in the ICMJE guidelines

    Cochrane systematic reviews

    No, unless original or substantially updated

    Datasets in public or restricted access repositories

    Yes - datasets should be cited in/hyperlinked from the manuscript if possible

    Figures and tables in non-research articles

    Yes, if, where applicable, permission has been obtained from the original publisher by the submitting author

    Health Technology Assessment reports

    At the Editor's discretion - contact the Editor for more information

    Open science: data posted and discussed on wikis, blogs, online electronic lab notebooks, networking websites incorporated into submitted manuscript

    Yes, usually permissible

    Preprint servers, including authors' personal and institutional websites

    Yes – this does not constitute previous publication

    Study protocol published

    Yes - published protocols should be cited

    Summary results in clinical trial registries

    Yes - accession number should be included in the abstract

    Translations into English

    At the Editor's discretion, provided there is agreement from the original journal/publisher, no breach of copyright and the original publication is cited.

     

     

    Communication of findings prior to publication

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    BMC journals do not wish to hinder communication among researchers. We support open communications between researchers whether on a recognised community preprint server, through discussions at conferences or on online collaborative sites such as wikis or the author’s blog.  Neither conference presentations nor posting on recognized preprint servers constitute prior publication.

    Researchers may respond to requests from the media in response to a preprint or conference presentation, by providing explanation or clarification of the work, or information about its context. In these circumstances, media coverage will not hinder editorial handling of the submission. 

    Researchers should be aware that such coverage may reduce or pre-empt coverage by other media at the time of publication. We also advise that researchers approached by reporters in response to a preprint make it clear that the paper has not yet undergone peer review, that the content is provisional and that the conclusions may change. Authors are expected to keep details of the peer review and editorial processes confidential.

    We believe it important that the peer-reviewed and published version of a paper should be publicly available when the work is discussed in the public media, allowing the press to provide informed comment based on this version. For that reason, we strongly discourage the direct soliciting of media coverage to appear ahead of publication of the final version of a paper.

    If further clarification is required, please contact the press office by e-mail.

    Text recycling

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    Authors should be aware that replication of text from their own previous publications is text recycling (also referred to as self-plagiarism), and in some cases is considered unacceptable. Where overlap of text with authors’ own previous publications is necessary or unavoidable, duplication must always be reported transparently and be properly attributed and compliant with copyright requirements. In collaboration with COPE, BMC has created guidelines for Editors on how to deal with text recycling which provide further detailed information on when text recycling is or is not considered acceptable. If a manuscript contains text that has been published elsewhere, authors should notify the Editor of this on submission.

     

    Peer review

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    All research articles, and most other article types, published in BMC journals undergo thorough peer review. This usually involves review by two independent peer reviewers. Individual journals may differ in their peer review processes; for example, some journals operate an open and others a closed peer review system. For an individual journal’s peer review policy, please see the journal's 'About' page.

    Peer review policy

    All submissions to BMC journals are assessed by an Editor, who will decide whether they are suitable for peer review. Where an Editor is on the author list or has any other competing interest regarding a specific manuscript, another member of the Editorial Board will be assigned to assume responsibility for overseeing peer review. Submissions felt to be suitable for consideration will be sent for peer review by appropriate independent experts identified by the Handling Editor. Editors will make a decision based on the reviewers’ reports and authors are sent these reports along with the editorial decision on their manuscript. Authors should note that even in light of one positive report, concerns raised by another reviewer may fundamentally undermine the study and result in the manuscript being rejected.

    Open peer review

    For journals operating an open peer review process, the reviewers' names are included on the peer review reports. In addition, if the manuscript is published, the named reports are published online alongside the article. On rare occasions, information from the pre-publication history may not be available for a specific article.

    Authors will be aware of the reviewers’ names during the peer review process and vice versa. However, there should not be direct correspondence between authors and reviewers. Any correspondence between the authors and the reviewers during or after the review process should be made through the journal Editors.

    Transparent peer review

    For journals operating a transparent peer review process, if the manuscript is published, the peer review reports are published online alongside the article. The name of the reviewer is not published. On rare occasions, information from the pre-publication history may not be available for a specific article.

    Closed peer review

    Most journals operate a closed peer review process. Reviewers will be treated anonymously and the pre-publication history of each article will not be made available online.

    Peer reviewers

    Authors may suggest potential reviewers if they wish; however, whether or not to consider these reviewers is at the Editor's discretion. Authors should not suggest recent collaborators or colleagues who work in the same institution as themselves. Authors who wish to suggest peer reviewers can do so in the cover letter and should provide institutional email addresses where possible, or information which will help the Editor to verify the identity of the reviewer (for example an ORCID or Scopus ID).

    Authors may request exclusion of individuals as peer reviewers, but they should explain the reasons in their cover letter on submission. Authors should not exclude too many individuals as this may hinder the peer review process. Please note that the Editor may choose to invite excluded peer reviewers.

    Intentionally falsifying information, for example, suggesting reviewers with a false name or email address, will result in rejection of the manuscript and may lead to further investigation in line with our misconduct policy.

    Portability of peer review

    Within BMC

    To support efficient and thorough peer review, we aim to reduce the number of times a manuscript is re-reviewed after rejection from a BMC journal, thereby speeding up the publication process and reducing the burden on peer reviewers. If a manuscript does not reach the interest criteria of a given BMC journal, but is sound and in scope for another BMC journal, we offer authors the option to transfer the manuscript together with the reviewer reports to the other journal.

    Editors may share manuscripts with Editors of other BMC journals before contacting authors in order to assess suitability for transfer to another journal. Authors who do not wish their manuscript to be shared with other BMC journals should indicate this in their cover letter on submission. Reviewers who do not wish us to share their report with another BMC journal should indicate this in the confidential section of their report. Transfer of a manuscript does not imply that it will be automatically accepted by the receiving journal, and on some occasions the Editor of the receiving journal may need to conduct their own peer review and/or reject the manuscript if it is not suitable.

    If a manuscript is transferred to, and published in, a journal with open peer review, we will, wherever possible, make the reviewers' reports available through the pre-publication history of the article (see ‘Open peer review’ above). On some occasions this will not be possible; for example, when the manuscript has been peer reviewed in a closed peer review journal first. Although we will ask reviewers to make their reports available, reviewers providing reports for closed peer review journals will sometimes prefer to maintain this confidentiality and their anonymity.

    Where a manuscript was initially reviewed in an open peer review journal and is subsequently transferred to a closed peer review journal and published, the reviews will not be published alongside the article.

    Between BMC and other publishers/third parties

    BMC supports innovations in peer review which can improve efficiency and save peer reviewers’ time and effort. Some BMC journals will consider manuscripts from other publishers, for example journals in the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium and from journals in the eLife consortium. We are also willing to consider manuscripts which have been reviewed by third parties, for example, Peerage of Science. However, submission of a manuscript with reviewer reports from another journal or an independent review service does not imply that it will be automatically accepted by the receiving journal and additional peer review may be required.

     

    Confidentiality

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    Editors will treat all manuscripts submitted to all BMC journals in confidence. BMC adheres to COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers. Reviewers are therefore required to respect the confidentiality of the peer review process and not reveal any details of a manuscript or its review, during or after the peer-review process, beyond the information released by the journal. If reviewers wish to involve a colleague in the review process they should first obtain permission from the journal. The Editor should be informed of the names of any individuals who assisted in the review process when the report is returned.

    BMC will not share manuscripts with third parties outside of BMC except in cases of suspected misconduct. See our Misconduct policy for further information. Manuscripts may be shared with other Editors at BMC, unless authors indicate on submission that they do not wish for their manuscript to be passed on beyond the journal they submitted to. See portability of peer review for more information.

    BMC regularly undertakes research projects designed to help improve processes for authors, reviewers and editors, and how science is communicated in our journals. Participation in this research will not affect the editorial review of manuscripts, the consideration given to reviewer reports by Editors or the confidentiality of the submission and review process. Depending on the nature of the research project we may seek ethical approval and may need to contact you for consent to participate. Research may be undertaken retrospectively after the publication of manuscripts; in all cases details of manuscripts will be kept confidential.

     

    Misconduct

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    BMC takes seriously all allegations of potential misconduct. As members of COPE, all BMC journals will follow the COPE guidelines outlining how to deal with cases of suspected misconduct.

    In cases of suspected research or publication misconduct, it may be necessary for the Editor to contact and share manuscripts with third parties, for example, author(s)’ institution(s) and ethics committee(s). BMC may also seek advice from COPE and discuss anonymized cases in the COPE Forum. The editor may also involve BMC’s independent ombudsman.

    A notice of suspected transgression of ethical standards in the peer review system may be included as part of the author’s and article’s bibliographic record.

    Research misconduct

    All research involving humans (including human data and human material) and animals must have been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework (see our Ethics policy for further information). If there is suspicion that research has not taken place within an appropriate ethical framework, the Editor may reject a manuscript and may inform third parties, for example, author(s)’ institution(s) and ethics committee(s).

    In cases of proven research misconduct involving published articles, or where the scientific integrity of the article is significantly undermined, articles may be retracted. See our Retraction policy for further information.

    Data falsification and fabrication

    Data falsification is manipulating research data with the intention of giving a false impression. This includes manipulating images, removing outliers or “inconvenient” results, changing, adding or omitting data points, etc. Data fabrication means the making up of research findings.

    Any questions regarding data integrity raised during or after the peer review process will be referred to the Editor. The Editor may request (anonymised) underlying study data from the author(s) for inspection or verification. If the original data cannot be produced, the manuscript may be rejected or, in the case of a published article, retracted. Cases of suspected misconduct will be reported to the author(s)’ institution(s).

    Publication misconduct

    As members of COPE, all BMC journals will follow the COPE guidelines outlining how to deal with cases of potential publication misconduct.

    Plagiarism

    BMC is a member of CrossCheck’s plagiarism detection initiative and uses plagiarism detection software. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.

     

    Corrections and retractions

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    Rarely, it may be necessary for BMC to publish corrections to, or retractions of, articles published in its journals, so as to maintain the integrity of the academic record.

    In line with BMC’s Permanency policy, corrections to, or retractions of, published articles will be made by publishing a Correction or a Retraction note bidirectionally linked to the original article. Any alterations to the original article will be described in the note. The original article remains in the public domain and the subsequent Correction or Retraction will be widely indexed. In the exceptional event that material is considered to infringe certain rights or is defamatory, we may have to remove that material from our site and archive sites.

    Authors, readers or organizations who become aware of errors or ethics issues in a published article are encouraged to contact the individual journal in the first instance via the contact details available on the journal website. All reports will be considered by the Editors; additional expert advice may be sought when deciding on the most appropriate course of action. The Springer Nature Research Integrity Group provides support to Editors in addressing publication ethics issues in a COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)-compliant manner.

    Corrections

    Changes to published articles that affect the interpretation and conclusion of the article, but do not fully invalidate the article, will, at the Editor(s)’ discretion, be corrected via publication of a Correction that is indexed and bidirectionally linked to the original article.

    Retractions

    On rare occasions, when the interpretation or conclusion of an article is substantially undermined, it may be necessary for published articles to be retracted. SpringerOpen as part of SpringerNature will follow the COPE guidelines in such cases. Retraction notices are indexed and bidirectionally linked to the original article. The original article is watermarked as retracted and the title is amended with the prefix “Retracted article:”

    Editorial Expressions of Concern

    When an Editor becomes aware of serious concerns regarding interpretation or conclusion of a published article, they may choose to publish a statement alerting the readership. Scenarios in which Editorial Expressions of Concern may be published include prolonged investigations of very complex cases and when the concerns may have a significant and immediate impact on public health or public policy. An Editorial Expression of Concern may be superseded by a subsequent Correction or Retraction, but will remain part of the permanent published record.

    Removal of published content

    In exceptional circumstances, Springer Nature reserves the right to remove an article, chapter, book or other content from Springer Nature’s online platforms. Such action may be taken when (i) Springer Nature has been advised that content is defamatory, infringes a third party’s intellectual property right, right to privacy, or other legal right, or is otherwise unlawful; (ii) a court or government order has been issued, or is likely to be issued, requiring removal of such content; (iii) content, if acted upon, would pose an immediate and serious risk to health. Removal may be temporary or permanent. Bibliographic metadata (e.g. title and authors) will be retained, and will be accompanied by a statement explaining why the content has been removed.

    Appeals and complaints

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    Appeal against a rejection

    If you wish to ask the Editor or Editorial Board to reconsider a rejection of a manuscript, you should, in the first instance, contact the Editor through the instructions on the journal website. These are considered appeals, which, by policy, must take second place to the normal workload. In practice, this means that decisions on appeals often take several weeks. Only one appeal is permitted for each manuscript. Final decisions on appeals will be made by the Editorial Board Member handling the paper or the Editor.

    In general, an appeal against a rejection decision on a manuscript will only be considered if:

    • the authors can demonstrate that an error that determined the final decision has been made - by a referee or the Editors - during review

      or
    • if important additional data can be provided

      or
    • if a convincing case of bias in the process can be demonstrated

    Authors who wish to appeal an editorial decision should submit a formal letter of appeal to the journal by contacting the journal editorial office. Include the manuscript tracking number in the email subject line and the appeal letter. Most BMC journals use an appeal form and will not consider an appeal without it.

    If appeals are successful, then authors will be given instructions on how to proceed. If an appeal merits further consideration, the Editor may send the authors' response and the revised paper out for further peer review.

    For all other feedback and complaints, please check individual journal’s ‘About’ pages for more information.

  • Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. 

    World Journal of Emergency Surgery operates a single-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous.

    The benefit of single-blind peer review is that it is the traditional model of peer review that many reviewers are comfortable with, and it facilitates a dispassionate critique of a manuscript.

    Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two or more experts who will be asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, whether it duplicates already published work, and whether or not the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication. The Editors will reach a decision based on these reports and, where necessary, they will consult with members of the Editorial Board