EID Journal Home > Instructions to Authors > Mathematical Modeling Guide
Mathematical Modeling Guidelines
Editorial criteria for mathematical, economic, and statistical manuscripts
Overall content
- Must provide information of "immediate and practical" value to public health professionals.
- Must reflect public health realities.*
Writing style
- Should appeal to broad readership.
- In the main text, equations should be kept to a minimum. Any equations used should
be written out in words rather than mathematical notation.
- Mathematical, statistical, and economic jargon should be avoided.
- In the main text, and in diagrams and tables associated with the main text,
mathematical notation should be kept to a minimum.
Technical aspects
- Where possible, mathematical, economic, and statistical articles should include a
simple schematic diagram outlining elements in the model(s) and how they are
connected.
- Models should contain detailed sensitivity analyses. Univariate (1 variable at a time)
sensitivity analyses are generally considered inadequate. One goal of
sensitivity analyses should be to define which inputs are, within the model,
relatively most important.
- All articles should contain sufficient description of the methods to allow
independent replication of results by another researcher with suitable skills
and interest.
- Use of online-only appendixes is encouraged as means to provide technical details
of methods used (e.g., equations in mathematical notation) and additional sets
of results. However, lengthy, online-only appendixes may not be copyedited or checked and subsequently will be posted with a note to readers clearly indicating that fact.
- Figures should be as simple as possible. The use of color should be kept to a minimum.
- It is insufficient to only report p values as evidence of statistical
significance. Authors must also report some measure of dispersion (e.g.,
standard deviations, confidence intervals).
*Purely conceptual modeling papers are unlikely to be of
immediate and practical value.
This page posted February 2, 2007
This page last reviewed July 20, 2007