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Instructions for Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica authors |
General information
Manuscript text Illustrations and figures Tables Additional files Style and language |
General information
Submission process Manuscripts must be submitted by one of the authors of the manuscript, and should not be submitted by anyone on their behalf. The submitting author takes responsibility for the article during submission and peer review. To facilitate rapid publication and to minimize administrative costs, Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica accepts only online submission. The submission process is compatible with version 3.0 or later of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, and with most other modern web browsers. It can be used from PC, Mac, or Unix platforms. Files can be submitted as a batch, or one by one. The submission process can be interrupted at any time - when users return to the site, they can carry on where they left off. See below for examples of acceptable word processor and graphics file formats. Additional files of any type, such as movies, animations, or original data files, can also be submitted as part of the publication. During submission you will be asked to provide a cover letter. Please use this to explain why your manuscript should be published in the journal and to elaborate on any issues relating to our editorial policies detailed in the instructions for authors. Assistance with the process of manuscript preparation and submission is available from the customer support team (info@biomedcentral.com). We also provide a collection of links to useful tools and resources for scientific authors, on our Tools for Authors page.
Publication and peer review processes
Once an article is accepted, it is published in Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica immediately as a provisional PDF file. The paper will subsequently be published in both fully browseable web form, and as a formatted PDF. The article will then be available through Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica, BioMed Central and PubMed Central, and will also be included in PubMed. The ultimate responsibility for any decision lies with the Editor-in-Chief, to whom any appeals against rejection should be addressed.
Article-processing charges
Editorial policies Any manuscript submitted to the journal must not already have been published in another journal or be under consideration by any other journal, although it may have been deposited on a preprint server. Manuscripts must not have already been published in any journal or other citable form, with the exception that the journal is willing to consider peer-reviewing manuscripts that are translations of articles originally published in another language. In this case, the consent of the journal in which the article was originally published must be obtained and the fact that the article has already been published must be made clear on submission and stated in the abstract. Manuscripts that are derived from papers presented at conferences can be submitted unless they have been published as part of the conference proceedings in a peer reviewed journal. Authors are required to ensure that no material submitted as part of a manuscript infringes existing copyrights, or the rights of a third party. Authors who publish in Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica retain copyright to their work (more information). Correspondence concerning articles published in Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica is encouraged . Submission of a manuscript to Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica implies that all authors have read and agreed to its content, and that any experimental research that is reported in the manuscript has been performed with the approval of an appropriate ethics committee. Research carried out on humans must be in compliance with the Helsinki Declaration, and any experimental research on animals must follow internationally recognized guidelines. A statement to this effect must appear in the Methods section of the manuscript, including the name of the body which gave approval, with a reference number where appropriate. Informed consent must also be documented. Manuscripts may be rejected if the editorial office considers that the research has not been carried out within an ethical framework, e.g. if the severity of the experimental procedure is not justified by the value of the knowledge gained. Generic drug names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses in the Methods section. We ask authors of Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica papers to complete a declaration of competing interests, which should be provided as a separate section of the manuscript, to follow the Acknowledgements. Where an author gives no competing interests, the listing will read 'The author(s) declare that they have no competing interests'. Much has been written about competing interests (or conflict of interest, as other journals call it) within scientific research, but the following articles provide some background:
R Smith: Making progress with competing interests. BMJ 2002, 325 :1375-1376 CD DeAngelis, PB Fontanarosa, A Flanagin: Reporting financial conflicts of interest and relationships between investigators and research sponsors. JAMA 2001, 286 :89-9 K Morin, H Rakatansky, FA Riddick Jr, LJ Morse, JM O'Bannon 3rd, MS Goldrich, P Ray, M Weiss, RM Sade, MA Spillman: Managing conflicts of interest in the conduct of clinical trials. JAMA 2002, 287 :78-84 Any 'in press' articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers' assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the editorial office. Submission of a manuscript to Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica implies that readily reproducible 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. Nucleic acid sequences, protein sequences, and atomic coordinates should be deposited in an appropriate database in time for the accession number to be included in the published article. In computational studies where the sequence information is unacceptable for inclusion in databases because of lack of experimental validation, the sequences must be published as an additional file with the article. Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica also supports initiatives aimed at improving the reporting of biomedical research. We recommend authors refer to the MIBBI Portal for prescriptive checklists for reporting biological and biomedical research where applicable.
Nucleotide sequences
Protein sequences
Structures
Chemical structures and assays
Microarray data
Computional modeling
Plasmids
BioMed Central is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors who have appealed against a rejection but remain concerned about the editorial process can refer their case to COPE. For more information, visit www.publicationethics.org.uk. BioMed Central endorses the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) Policy Statement on Geopolitical Intrusion on Editorial Decisions. |
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General information
Manuscript text Illustrations and figures Tables Additional files Style and language |
Preparing main manuscript text
File formats
Users of other word processing packages should save or convert their files to RTF before uploading. Many free tools are available which ease this process. TeX/LaTeX users: We recommend using BioMed Central's TeX template and BibTeX stylefile. If you use this standard format, you can submit your manuscript in TeX format (after you submit your TEX file, you will be prompted to submit your BBL file). If you have used another template for your manuscript, or if you do not wish to use BibTeX, then please submit your manuscript as a DVI file. We do not recommend converting to RTF. Publicon users: Information about Publicon and instructions for authoring in Publicon are available. Note that figures must be submitted as separate image files, not as part of the submitted DOC/ PDF/TEX/DVI file.
Article types
Please read the descriptions of each of the article types, choose which is appropriate for your article and structure it accordingly. If in doubt, your manuscript should be classified as Research, the structure for which is described below.
Manuscript sections for Research articles
You can download a template (Mac and Windows compatible; Microsoft Word 98/2000) for your article. For instructions on use, see below. The Accession Numbers of any nucleic acid sequences, protein sequences or atomic coordinates cited in the manuscript should be provided, in square brackets and include the corresponding database name; for example, [EMBL:AB026295, EMBL:AC137000, DDBJ:AE000812, GenBank:U49845, PDB:1BFM, Swiss-Prot:Q96KQ7, PIR:S66116]. The databases for which we can provide direct links are: EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (EMBL), DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ ), GenBank at the NCBI (GenBank), Protein Data Bank (PDB), Protein Information Resource (PIR) and the Swiss-Prot Protein Database (Swiss-Prot). Title pageThis should list the title of the article, the full names, institutional addresses, and e-mail addresses for all authors. The corresponding author should also be indicated.
Abstract
Background
Methods
Results and Discussion
Conclusions
List of abbreviations
Competing interests
Authors are required to complete a declaration of competing interests. All competing interests that are declared will be listed at the end of published articles. Where an author gives no competing interests, the listing will read 'The author(s) declare that they have no competing interests'.
When completing your declaration, please consider the following questions: Financial competing interests
Non-financial competing interests Are there any non-financial competing interests (political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, intellectual, commercial or any other) to declare in relation to this manuscript? If so, please specify. If you are unsure as to whether you, or one your co-authors, has a competing interest please discuss it with the editorial office.
Authors' contributions
An "author" is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study. To qualify as an author one should 1) have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) have been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) have given final approval of the version to be published. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship. We suggest the following kind of format (please use initials to refer to each author's contribution): AB carried out the molecular genetic studies, participated in the sequence alignment and drafted the manuscript. JY carried out the immunoassays. MT participated in the sequence alignment. ES participated in the design of the study and performed the statistical analysis. FG conceived of the study, and participated in its design and coordination and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. 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, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support.
Authors' information
Acknowledgements
Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements. Please list the source(s) of funding for the study, for each author, and for the manuscript preparation in the acknowledgements section. Authors must describe the role of the funding body, if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; and in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
References
Only articles and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers, may be cited; unpublished abstracts, unpublished data and personal communications should not be included in the reference list, but may be included in the text. Notes/footnotes are not allowed. Obtaining permission to quote personal communications and unpublished data from the cited author(s) is the responsibility of the author. Journal abbreviations follow Index Medicus/MEDLINE. Citations in the reference list should contain all named authors, regardless of how many there are. We encourage authors to use a recent version of EndNote (version 5 and above) or Reference Manager (version 10) when formatting their reference list, as this allows references to be automatically extracted. Authors submitting articles in EndNote 5 or higher or Reference Manager 10 format will save £30 on the £1075 (€1215, US$1635) article processing charge. In order to obtain this discount, you should upload the manuscript file containing your EndNote or Reference Manager-formatted bibliography as a .doc file. Please ensure you do not convert to another format (e.g. RTF or PDF). On upload, the discount will be automatically granted and you will receive a confirmation on-screen and by email. You will also be able to preview an HTML version of the extracted references during submission, and we urge authors to check this. EndNote or Reference Manager users should also make sure that any changes made to the reference list are done within their reference management program, rather than by manually editing the formatted bibliography. This is because manually introduced changes will not be picked up in the automatically extracted list. Further details about EndNote and Reference Manager are available on the BioMed Central site, including style files that conform to the BioMed Central style and information about how to upgrade. Users of other reference management programs should be able to select other journal styles that output a numeric list styled similarly to the guide below. For EndNote users, we provide a detailed technical guide to help with resolving problems that are encountered with the automated reference extraction process. Please check that your reference extraction is accurate after uploading the manuscript text file. We are also working towards integrating data from RefWorks referencing software. We are working in partnership with the development team of RefWorks to produce a high quality extraction process. Examples of the Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica reference style are shown below. Please take care to follow the reference style precisely; references not in the correct style may be retyped, necessitating tedious proofreading.
Links
Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica reference style
Article within a journal
Article within a journal supplement
In press article
Published abstract
Article within conference proceedings
Book chapter, or article within a book
Whole issue of journal
Whole conference proceedings
Complete book
Monograph or book in a series
Book with institutional author
PhD thesis
Link / URL
Microsoft Word template
Download the template (Mac and Windows compatible Word 1998/2000) from our site, and save it to your hard drive. Double click the template to open it.
How to use the Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica template
For extra convenience, you can use the template as one of your standard Word templates. To do this, put a copy of the template file in Word's 'Templates' folder, normally C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates on a PC. The next time you create a new document in Word using the File menu, the template will appear as one of the available choices for a new document. Note - From version 6, EndNote includes a full set of structured article templates for BioMed Central journals. Users of EndNote are encouraged to upgrade if necessary and make use of these templates. More information is available here. |
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General information Manuscript text Illustrations and figures Tables Additional files Style and language |
Preparing illustrations and figuresFigures should be provided as separate files and should not be included in the main text of the submitted manuscript. Each figure should comprise only a single file. There is no charge for the use of color. Please read our figure preparation guidelines for detailed instructions on maximising the quality of your figures.
Formats
Figure
legends
Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures or tables that have previously been published elsewhere. |
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Preparing tablesEach table should be numbered in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e. Table 1, 2, 3 etc.). Tables should also have a title that summarizes the whole table, maximum 15 words. Detailed legends may then follow, but should be concise. Smaller tables considered to be integral to the manuscript can be pasted into the end of the document text file, in portrait format (note that tables on a landscape page must be reformatted onto a portrait page or submitted as additional files). These will be typeset and displayed in the final published form of the article. Such tables should be formatted using the 'Table object' in a word processing program to ensure that columns of data are kept aligned when the file is sent electronically for review; this will not always be the case if columns are generated by simply using tabs to separate text. Commas should not be used to indicate numerical values. Color and shading should not be used. Larger datasets can be uploaded separately as additional files. Additional files will not be displayed in the final, published form of the article, but a link will be provided to the files as supplied by the author. Tabular data provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls) or comma separated values (.csv). As with all files, please use the standard file extensions. |
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General information
Manuscript text Illustrations and figures Tables Additional files Style and language |
Preparing additional filesAlthough Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica does not restrict the length and quantity of data in a paper, there may still be occasions where an author wishes to provide data sets, tables, movie files, or other information as additional information. These files can be uploaded using the 'Additional Material files' button in the manuscript submission process. The maximum file size for additional files is 20 MB each, and files will be virus-scanned on submission. Any additional files will be linked into the final published article in the form supplied by the author, but will not be displayed within the paper. They will be made available in exactly the same form as originally provided. If additional material is provided, please list the following information in a separate section of the manuscript text, immediately following the tables (if any):
Additional datafiles should be referenced explicitly by file name within the body of the article, e.g. 'See additional file 1: Movie1 for the original data used to perform this analysis'.
Formats and uploading
As with figure files, files should be given the standard file extensions. This is especially important for Macintosh users, since the Mac OS does not enforce the use of standard extensions. Please also make sure that each additional file is a single table, figure or movie (please do not upload linked worksheets or PDF files larger than one sheet).
Mini-websites
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General information
Manuscript text Illustrations and figures Tables Additional files Style and language |
Style and language
General
Gene names should be in italic, but protein products should be in plain type. There is no explicit limit on the length of articles submitted, but authors are encouraged to be concise. There is no restriction on the number of figures, tables or additional files that can be included with each article online. Figures and tables should be sequentially referenced. Authors should include all relevant supporting data with each article. Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica will not edit submitted manuscripts for style or language; reviewers may advise rejection of a manuscript if it is compromised by grammatical errors. Authors are advised to write clearly and simply, and to have their article checked by colleagues before submission. In-house copyediting will be minimal. Non-native speakers of English may choose to make use of a copyediting service.
Help and advice on scientific writing
Abbreviations
Units
Last revised: 3 October 2005 |
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