Article Categories

• Research article  is a complete academic investigation that covers a significant advance in a specialty. It usually includes a structured abstract under 300 words, an introduction, sections with headings of Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, and References. Meta-analyses are published as original articles as well. The full text is about 3500 words and the figures and tables need to be kept under 7 items.
• Review article   address a particular subject and provide a profound and comprehensive look into a field which usually highlights unresolved questions, historical perspectives, and provides developmental trends or directions of investigation based on literature. It includes narrative review and systematic review, of both the full text need to be 4000-5000 words and the abstract need to be non-structured within 250 words, with 3-5 figures and tables, and the references within 100 items.Unsolicited offers of Reviews are considered. Once accepted, an abstract graph is warranted.
• Case report narrates a medical condition experienced by one or more patients for clinical, scientific, or educational purposes. It includes an introductory paragraph, case description, discussion, and references section. CARE guideline and reporting checklist are encouraged when preparing the manuscript. The full text need kept within 2000 words, and a non-structured abstract around 150 words is needed.
• Perspective  presents a personal opinion or fresh insights into new advances in an important and popular topic scholarly. Viewpoints in a perspective should be well focused and logically.  The full text is suggested around 2000 words, with 1 or 2 figures or tables and around 15 references.
• Guideline or Consensus  Guideline or consensus is usually developed by a working task group of experts for the purpose to guide clinical practice in a specific scope or a clinical question.
• Data article is a scientific descriptor for a dataset in terms of data generation, characteristics, quality control, applicable value, etc. The Author Instruction for Data Article provides detail information. The dataset is required to be deposited to a recognized database, e.g., National Population Health Data Achive (PHDA), for peer review, and for public access and reuse if the manuscript is accepted.
• Letter is a concise article reporting a cutting-in-edge or exploratory research findings.Articles can go through the fast-track process and be published quickly once accepted. The manuscripts should be within 3000 words, without an abstract, and may include one figure and/or one table.
• Editorial  offers commentary and analysis to the current issue of the journal, aiming to influence public opinion, and promote critical thinking, and sometimes motivate people to take actions on a specific issue. Editorial is usually solicited.

 

Preparing cover page

All manuscript start with a cover page which should include the following information:

-Article title

-Author list in the authorship order for publication. For Chinese author, please provide Chinese name in bracket.

-Affiliations (department, institute, city, zip code, country, phone, email).

-Brief introduction of the first author and the Corresponding author (with ORCID). 

-Whether the manuscript or any part has been previously published, or presented on a conference, in any language. Whether all authors have verified the manuscript and consent to the submission.  

-Author contributions statement as of Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)      

-Funding support (fund resource, project title and the serial number), if applicable. 

-Ethic review ( for study involving human being or animal), approval from institutional review board 

-Acknowledgement, if applicable.

 

Preparing manuscript

A manuscript file include the following 6 sections:

1. Title, abstract, and key words

The title need to be weighted carefully to brief and easy to understand. It is important that abstract is self-explanatory. Research articles should include a structured abstract within 300 words with sections of objectives, methods, results, and conclusions. For other types of article, please see article categories. Articles with an abstract need 3 to 8 key words to enhance findability in the index systems.

2. Main text

For research articles, the main text should include the following sections:

Introduction: Clearly state the purpose and, where applicable, a brief and relevant background of the study, thus allow readers to understand the context and evaluate the results of the present study.

Materials and Methods: Describe the subjects (including criteria for selection) and the equipment involved, as well as the methods used. The sources of all equipment, drugs, chemicals, and experimental animals or cell lines must be identified. The methodology in this section should include sufficient information to fulfill repeatability by other researchers.

Results: Describe the data and the observed phenomena objectively, truthfully, and accurately, in text, figures, and tables. This part should be well organized and presented clearly and concisely. Repetitively narrate the data displayed in tables or figures should be avoided. Do not discuss the findings or cite others’ result in this section.

Discussion: Provide interpretation of the results of the current study in relation to previously published work. Focus on the significance of the results and emphasize innovation and importance of the study. Limitations of the current study that may bear on the interpretation of the results should be addressed.

Notes:

Unit of Measurements   In accordance with the requirement of the International System of Units (SI), data and units in the text, tables, and figures should be correctly written. If blood pressure is presented in mm Hg, the conversion factor to kPa should be noted the first time it appears in the text.

Abbreviations and acronyms  Use only standard abbreviations (please refer to xx). Avoid using abbreviations in the article title. The full term for which an abbreviation stands should precede its first use in the text and the abstract, unless it is a standard unit of measurement.

3. Article information

Acknowledgement

For individuals who do not meet the qualifications for authorship but have made a certain contribution to the research, such as general management in the research team, language polishing for manuscript, or providing financial support only, may be acknowledged at this section.

Ethical compliance

For researches involving humans or animals, declare that the approval of the institutional ethics review board has been obtained, and attach the approval number. For other types of articles that do not require ethical review, declare "Not applicable" here.

Conflict of interest disclosure

All authors are required to provide the editorial office with relevant information by completing a conflict of interest disclosure form, and to disclose their respective conflicts of interest to the public upon publication of the article.

Funding

Declare the name and number of the funding agency related to this article.

Data share

Declare which data sharing agreement is applicable to the scientific data associated with this study.

4. References

References should be numbered consecutively in order of citations in the main text. For journal articles, the volume, issue, page and doi are essential information. Use the abbreviate name of a journal as listed in PubMed. The citing formats of the common literature sources are below:

  Journal articles

Portelius E, Zetterberg H, Skillbck T, et al. Cerebrospinal fluid neurogranin: relation to cognition and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease. Brain 2015; 138(Pt 11):3373-85. doi:10.1093/brain/awv267.

  Non English literature

Wilkniss SM, Hunter RH, Silverstein SM. Multimodal treatment of aggression and violence in individuals with psychosis. Sante Ment Que 2004; 29(2):143-74. French.

   Books

Murray PR, Rosenthal KS, Kobayashi GS, Pfaller MA. Medical microbiology. 4th ed. St. Louis: Mosby; 2002.

Meltzer PS, Kallioniemi A, Trent JM. Chromosome alterations in human solid tumors. In: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, editors. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York: McGraw-Hill; 2002. p.93-113.

Conference paper

Christensen S, Oppacher F. An analysis of Koza's computational effort statistic for genetic programming. In: Foster JA, Lutton E, Miller J, Ryan C, Tettamanzi AG, editors. Genetic programming. EuroGP 2002: Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Genetic Programming; 2002 Apr 3-5; Kinsdale, Ireland. Berlin: Springer; 2002. p. 182-91.

Dissertations

Borkowski MM. Infant sleep and feeding: a telephone survey of Hispanic Americans [dissertation]. Mount Pleasant (MI): Central Michigan University; 2002.

Journal article on the internet

Abood S. Quality improvement initiative in nursing homes: the ANA acts in an advisory role. Am J Nurs 2002 Jun  [cited 2002-08-12]; 102(6): [about 1 p.]. Available from: https://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/Fulltext/2002/06000/Quality_Improvement_Initiative_in_Nursing_Homes.31.aspx Subscription required.

Electronic books

Foley KM, Gelband H, editors. Improving palliative care for cancer. Washington: National Academy Press; 2001 [cited 2002 Jul 9]. Available from:  https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10149/improving-palliative-care-for-cancer.

Homepage/website

eatright.org [Internet]. Chicago: Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics; c2016 [cited 2016 Dec 27]. Available from: https://www.eatright.org/.

Dataset deposit record

Kraemer MUG, Sinka ME, Duda KA, et al. The global compendium of Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus occurrence [dataset]. 2015 Jun 30 [cited 2015 Oct 23]. In: Dryad Digital Repository. Available from: https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.47v3c. Referenced in doi: 10.7554/eLife.08347.

Dataset repository

Dryad Digital Repository [Internet]. Durham (NC): Dryad. 2008 Jan - [cited 2014 Oct 3]. Available from: https://datadryad.org/stash/.

5. Tables, Figures, and legends

• Tables and figures should be cited in the text and numbered according to the order of apprearence in the text.  They should be attached in the manuscript as an appendix section following the reference section. The titles of tables and figures should be self-explanatory. All abbreviations appear in the table or figure need full text explanations at the footnotes.
• Graphs, flow charts, diagrams, photographs, and radiographs are put at the end of the full text accompanied with legends.
• All figures should be in high resolution (minimum 350 dpi) and minimally processed to factually represent the original data.
• All digitized images should be uploaded separately in format of TIFF, JPG, or PNG format, compacted in a file and uploaded during submission. Each component image of a composite figure need to meet the minimum resolution requirement and submitted individually at submission.
• figures that have been previously published are presented in the manuscript, it should be stated in the cover letter and a written permission from the copyright holder will be required. It is authors’ responsibility to obtain permission, cite properly, and acknowledge the copyright holder.
• Radiographic, micrographic, gel images should preserve scientific integrity. Only brightness, contrast, or color adjustments applied uniformly to an entire image are permissible, selectively highlight, misrepresent, obscure, or eliminate specific elements in the original figure are not accepted.
• For accepted manuscript, graphs, charts, illustrations, as well as titles, legends may be re-created or edited when necessary to reach standard of publication.
• The letters, numbers, and symbols in figures should be clear and easily discernible, i.e., generally not smaller than 6 bp. The font size within each figure should be consistent. Microscopic images should include a scale bar.

6. Supplementary materials for online publication

When submitting a manuscript, authors may include supplementary materials that are crucial for readers to better understand the article, such as tables and figures. For supplementary materials related to charts and diagrams, name them as Table S1, Figure S1, etc., and cite them accordingly within the manuscript. To enhance the transparency of publication for accepted articles, editors may have authors to provide supporting data for online publication to facilitate readers in better comprehension, which include but not limited to figures and tables that are not necessarily or too extensive to be included in the printed version, or video files to promote the article dissemination.

 

Reporting guidelines

To enhance the transparency and integrity in academic publication of medical research, we strongly encourage authors to use EQUATOR   reporting guidelines in preparing manuscripts. Authors are suggested to check their manuscripts against the checklists of reporting guidelines according to their research type. The commonly used reporting guidelines for medical research papers are listed as follows:

•       For randomized controlled clinical trials: CONSORT.
•       For observational studies: STROBE.
•       For systematic reviews and meta-analyses: PRISMA or MOOSE.
•       For diagnostic test studies: STARD.
•       For case reports: CARE.

 

Submitting

Please use the Online Submission System for submission. The documents required to complete a submission are listed as follows: