Generalities of a submitted manuscript
Manuscripts should be submitted online as Word and PDF documents. Articles judged preliminarily as suitable are sent out for external peer reviews, and are accepted for publication at the discretion of the Editor, who will also decide on adjustments for style and clarity of content and, along with the Publisher, on scheduling for publication. Major changes in content will be agreed with the authors.
A regular manuscript may consist of a maximum of 8,000 words. The first pages must display: 1) the article title; 2) the full name, highest academic degrees, and concise professional profile and institutional affiliation of each of the authors, 3) the correspondence author’s postal and e-mail addresses and telephone number, 4) a suggested running title of not more than fifty characters, including spaces, and 5) a minimum of six keywords to aid indexing.
The main text should be preceded by an Abstract (approximately 250 words). Most abstracts should be structured into introduction/background, objectives, method, results/findings, discussion, and conclusions. These should be also the main sections of the paper. After that and before the References, a section on Acknowledgements and Disclosures, also including approval of ethical committees for research papers, should be presented. All pages must be numbered consecutively starting with the title page. The preferred position of tables and figures in the text should be indicated on the left-hand margin. It is essential that approval for the reproduction or modification of figures and tables published elsewhere be sought and presented.
Units and Spellings
Système International (SI) units should be used, as given in Units, Symbols and Abbreviations (4th edition, 1988) published by the Royal Society of Medicine Services Ltd, 1 Wimpole Street, London W1M 8AE, UK. Other abbreviations should be used sparingly and only if a lengthy name or expression is repeated throughout the text. Spelling should conform to either British or American standards consistently throughout the paper. The use of jargon or obscure technical terms is strongly discouraged.
References
These should be in the Vancouver style. References should be numbered sequentially as they occur in the text and identified in the main text by numbers within square parentheses [ ]. The following are style examples. Where there are more than ten authors, the first three should be listed followed by et al. Journal titles should not be abbreviated. Do not use op cit.
[1] Mezzich JE, Salloum IM, Cloninger CR, Salvador-Carulla L, Kirmayer L, Banzato CE, Wallcraft J, Botbol M (2010). Person-centered Integrative Diagnosis: Conceptual Bases and Strctural Model. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 55:701-708.
[2] Montgomery K (2006). How Doctors Think. Clinical Judgment and the Practice of Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[3] Zimowski Z (2009). Health care ministry more than bringing communion. Available at: http://www.zenit.org/article-27346?I=english (last accessed 27 October 2009).
[4] Niiniluoto I (1984). The nature of science. In: Is Science Progressive? (ed. I. Niiniluto), pp. 1-9. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing.
Work that has not been accepted for publication and ‘personal communications’ should not appear in the reference list, but may be briefly mentioned and properly identified within the text. The Editor and Publisher recommend that citation of online published papers and other material should be done via a DOI (digital object identifier), which all reputable online published material should have - see http://www.doi.org/ and reference example [3] immediately above for more information. If an author cites anything which does not have a DOI, they run the risk of the cited material not being traceable. It is the authors’ responsibility to obtain permission from colleagues to include their work as a personal communication; a letter of permission should accompany the manuscript.
Illustrations
Illustrations should be embedded in your Word document. These should be referred to in the text as figures using Arabic numbers, e.g. Fig. 1, Fig. 2, etc., in order of appearance. All printed illustrations will be produced as half tones.
Tables
Tables should include only essential data. Each table should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals, e.g. Table 1, and given a short title. No vertical rules should be used. Units should appear in parentheses in the column headings and not in the body of the table. All abbreviations should be defined in a line under the table.
Captions
Captions for Tables and Illustrations should be placed below each.
Page Proofs
Proofs will be sent out to the correspondence author (copied to the Editors) by the Publisher via e-mail as an Acrobat PDF (portable document format) file. E-mail servers must be able to accept attachments up to 4MB in size. Further instructions will be sent with the proofs. Corrections must be emailed back to the Publisher within 3 days of receipt. Only typographical errors can be corrected at this stage. Major alterations to the text cannot be accepted and authors may be charged for excessive amendments.
Copyright Licence Agreement
Each Author will be required to sign a Copyright License Agreement (CLA) for an accepted paper as a condition of publication. Later external requests for reprinting will require the agreement of both the correspondence author and the Publisher.
Offprints
Free access to the electronic PDF of an article will be available to its authors . Paper offprints may be purchased by contacting the University of Buckingham Press via: info@unibuckinghampress.com