Guidelines for Authors

The Italian Journal of Medicine publishes the following article types:

Overview

Manuscripts will be carefully scrutinized for evidence of plagiarism, duplication and data manipulation; in particular, images will be carefully examined for any indication of intentional improper modification.
Any suspected misconduct ends up with a quick rejection and is then reported to the US Office of Research Integrity.

Submission checklist
You can use this list to carry out a final check of your submission before you send it to the journal for review. Please check the relevant section in this Guide for Authors for more details. Ensure that your work is written in correct English before submission.

Ensure that the following items are present
One author (multiple corresponding authors are not allowed) has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details:

  • E-mail address
  • Full postal address

All necessary files have been uploaded

  • Manuscript file
  • Include keywords (no more than five)
  • All figures (include relevant captions)
  • All tables (including titles, description, footnotes)
  • Ensure all figure and table citations in the text match the files provided

 Further considerations

  • Please prepare your manuscript for the single-blind peer review;
  • Ensure that all references mentioned in the Reference List are cited in the text, and vice versa
  • Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet)
  • A competing interests statement is provided, even if the authors have no competing interests to declare
  • Journal policies detailed in this guide have been reviewed
  • Referee suggestions and contact details provided, based on journal requirements
  • Manuscript has been 'spell checked' and 'grammar checked'. Ensure that your work is written in correct English before submission. Note that submitted manuscripts will not go through language-focused copyediting with the journal prior to or after acceptance; language-focused copyediting is the responsibility of the authors prior to submission. Professional copyediting can help authors improve the presentation of their work and increase their chances of being taken on by a publisher. In case you feel that your manuscript would benefit from professional English language copyediting checking language grammar and style, you can find a reliable revision service at:

 

The Corresponding Author (multiple corresponding authors are not allowed) must submit the manuscript online only through our Manuscript Submission System.

Authors are kindly invited to suggest potential reviewers (names, affiliations, and email addresses) for their manuscript, if they wish.

Desk reject criteria

The editorial team and the Editor-in-Chief of the Italian Journal of Medicine use desk review to filter out papers that will not be processed; these are papers that are not aligned with the journal's aims and scope, or that lack essential information in one or more sections of the paper, or that were not submitted in accordance with the correct procedure. In such cases, the paper will be desk rejected, which means it will be returned to the submitting author without being reviewed.

Preparing your manuscript

Manuscripts should be in either British or American English consistently throughout. Check for consistent spelling of names, terms, and abbreviations, including in tables and figure captions. Note that submitted manuscripts will not go through language-focused copyediting with the journal before or after acceptance; language-focused copyediting is the responsibility of the authors before submission.

Each manuscript has to be typewritten and double-spaced throughout;
pages should be in A4 format and numbered;
lines should be left numbered in continuum (10-digit numeric system).
The manuscript can be submitted either in Word or PDF format.

In case of not adhering to the journal requirements, the manuscript will be sent back to the authors for amendments.

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections (compulsory):

  • Ethical approval 
  • Availability of data and material
  • Competing interests
  • Funding
  • Authors' contributions
  • Acknowledgments

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 protocol number.
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.
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), you must obtain permission to publish from that person, or, in the case of children, from their parent or legal guardian. All case report presentations must have permission to publish.
You should not submit the form to us immediately, but we may request a copy at any time (including after publication).
If your manuscript contains no data from any specific person, please indicate "Not applicable" in this section.

Availability of data and materials
All manuscripts must include a statement about the availability of data and materials. Data availability statements should include information on where to find data supporting the results reported in the article, such as hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analyzed or generated during the study, if applicable.
If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.
Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of several if multiple datasets are involved):

  • The datasets generated and/or analyzed during this study can be found in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].
  • The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.
  • All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.
  • The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC], but are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.
  • The data that support the study's findings are available from [third party name], but there are restrictions on their availability because they were used under license for the current study and thus are not publicly available. However, the authors' data are available upon reasonable request and with the permission of [third party name].

 Competing interest
This section requires the declaration of all competing financial and non-financial interests. Please contact the editorial office if you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest. In this section, please use the authors' initials to refer to each author's competing interests. If you have no competing interests, please state in this section "The authors declare that they have no competing interests".

Funding
All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. If the funder has a specific role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, this should be declared.

Authors' contributions
The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Criteria for authorship can be found below (section Authorship and Contributorship). Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC, study concept, data analysis and interpretation, manuscript original drafting; RH, statistical analyses, histological examination, contribution to manuscript writing and editing. All the authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work”.

Acknowledgments
Please acknowledge anyone who contributed to the article but 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. If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

First and second pages

The first page must contain:

  1. Title of the paper (lowercase), without acronyms;
  2. First name and family name of each author, separated by commas;
  3. Affiliation(s) of each author (in English);
  4. Full name and full postal address of the corresponding author (please note that multiple corresponding authors are not allowed). Phone number and e-mail address for the correspondence should also be included;
  5. Key words (no more than 5).

The second page must contain:

  1. Authors' contributions, e.g., information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in the study (role of authors and contributors);
  2. All the above-detailed Declarations;
  3. Further information (e.g., conference presentation).

Tables and Figures

If tables are used, they should be double-spaced on separate pages of the manuscript, not embedded throughout the text. They should be numbered and cited in the text. Tables should be provided as editable Word files, and authors should ensure that they are presented in a publication-ready format. Considering how a table fits on a page in a wordprocessing program can often provide insight into how it will appear on a journal page. Larger or more complex tables will be made available online as supplementary material at the Editorial Office's sole discretion, including ensuring efficient readability of the paper publishing format.

If figures are used, they should be numbered and cited in the text and inserted at the end of the manuscript. Figures should be designed using a well-known software package. Please note that the Production Office will not redraw or re-letter any image.

A different caption for each figure must be provided at the end of the manuscript. Figures with different panels have to be grouped into a plate, and panels marked with letters.

In case of acceptance, authors are required to provide the figures as .tiff or .jpg files, with the following digital resolution:

  1. Color (saved as CMYK): 300 dpi - maximum width 17 cm - minimum width 8.5 cm
  2. Black and white/grays: 600 dpi - maximum width 17 cm-  minimum width 8.5 cm

Permissions

When citing someone else's work or considering reproducing figures or tables from a book or journal article, authors should make sure that they are not infringing a copyright.
Authors must obtain written permission for the reproduction and adaptation of material that has already been published. A copy of the written permission has to be provided before publication (otherwise the paper cannot be published) and appropriately cited in the figure caption. The procedure for requesting permission is the responsibility of the authors; PAGEPress will not refund any costs incurred in obtaining permission. Alternatively, it is advisable to use materials from other (free) sources.

Other

If abbreviations are used in the text, authors are required to write full name+abbreviation in brackets [e.g., Multiple Myeloma (MM)] the first time they are used, then only abbreviations can be written (apart from titles; in this case, authors have to write always the full name).
If names of equipment or substances are mentioned in the text, brand, company names and locations (city and state) for equipment and substances should be included in parentheses within the text.

References

References should be prepared strictly according to the Vancouver style. References must be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first cited in the text (not in alphabetical order), and they must be identified in the text by Arabic numerals in superscript. References in the main text must always be cited after dots and commas. References to personal communications and unpublished data should be incorporated in the text and not placed under the numbered references [Example: (Wright 2011, unpublished data) or (Wright 2011, personal communication)]. Where available, URLs for the references should be provided directly within the MS-Word document. References in the References section must be prepared as follows:

  1. more than three authors, cite 3 authors + et al. If the paper has only 4 authors, cite all authors;
  2. title style: sentence case; please use a capital letter only for the first word of the title;
  3. journal titles mentioned in the References list should be abbreviated according to the following websites:
    1. ISI Journal Abbreviations Index (http://library.caltech.edu/reference/abbreviations);
    2. Biological Journals and Abbreviations (https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/bioscience-journal-abbreviations);
    3. Medline List of Journal Titles (ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pubmed/J_Medline.txt);
  4. put year after the journal name;
  5. never put month and day in the last part of the references;
  6. cite only the volume (not the issue in brackets);
  7. pages have to be abbreviated, e.g., 351-8.

To ensure the correct citation format, please check your references in the PubMed database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed).

Examples:

Standard journal article
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med 2002;347:284-7.

Proceedings
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, eds. Genetic programming. EuroGP 2002: Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Genetic Programming, 2002 Apr 3-5, Kinsdale, Ireland. Berlin: Springer; 2002. pp 182-91.

Article with organization as author
Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group. Hypertension, insulin, and proinsulin in participants with impaired glucose tolerance. Hypertension 2002;40:679-86.

Books
Murray PR, Rosenthal KS, Kobayashi GS, Pfaller MA. Medical microbiology. 4th ed. St. Louis, MO: Mosby; 2002.
Bjørn Lomborg, ed. RethinkHIV - Smarter ways to invest in ending HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2012.
Meltzer PS, Kallioniemi A, Trent JM. Chromosome alterations in human solid tumors. In: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, eds. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; 2002. pp 93-113.

 

Peer-review policy

All submissions to the Italian Journal of Medicine are first checked for completeness (criteria for desk reject are available in the Guide for Authors) before being sent to an Editor, who decides whether they are suitable for peer review. If an Editor is on the author list or has a competing interest in a particular manuscript, another member of the Editorial Board will be assigned to oversee peer review. When making a decision, Editors will consider the peer-reviewed reports, but they will not be bound by the opinions or recommendations contained in them. A single peer reviewer's or the Editor's concern may result in the manuscript being rejected. Peer review reports are sent to authors along with the editorial decision on their manuscript.

Please see the About the Journal page for more information.

Authorship and Contributorship

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should only be based on substantial contributions to: i) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data, and to ii) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on iii) final approval of the version to be published; and iv) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Authors should provide a brief description of their individual contributions. Those who do not meet all four criteria should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading. Authors can find detailed information on the Publisher's website.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology

Authors must disclose whether they used artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image creators) in the creation of submitted work. Chatbots (such as ChatGPT) should not be listed as authors because they cannot be held accountable for the work's accuracy, integrity, and originality, all of which are required for authorship. Because AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that is incorrect, incomplete, or biased, authors should carefully review and edit the result. Authors should be able to assert that their paper contains no plagiarism, including text and images generated by AI. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript. Use of an LLM for language editing must be stated in the Acknowledgments section. 
We will review this policy on a regular basis and, if necessary, adapt it as we anticipate rapid development in this field in the near future.

Changes in Authorship

Authors are expected to consider carefully the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the original submission. Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript has been accepted and only if approved by the journal Editor:  Authors are requested to sign and send to the Editors a statement of agreement for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author(s) to be removed or added.
Please note that if your manuscript is accepted you will not be able to make any changes to the authors, or order of authors, of your manuscript once the editor has accepted your manuscript for publication.
No changes to the Authors or Corresponding Author can be made after publication of the article. Instead, a corrigendum may be considered by the journal editor.

Proofs

The corresponding author will receive a PDF proof and is asked to check it carefully (the publisher will execute a cursory check only).
Corrections other than printer errors should be avoided. Costs associated with such corrections will be charged to the authors.
Please be aware that the Publisher is unable to accept corrections made in ways other than specified at https://www.pagepress.org/site/guidance

 

Role of the funding source

Authors are requested to identify who provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement, it is recommended to state this.

Obligation to Register Clinical Trials

The ICMJE believes that it is important to foster a comprehensive, publicly available database of clinical trials. The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or concurrent comparison or control groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Medical interventions include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, etc. Our journals require, as a condition of consideration for publication, registration in a public trials registry. The journal considers a trial for publication only if it has been registered before the enrollment of the first patient. The journal does not advocate one particular registry, but requires authors to register their trial in a registry that meets several criteria. The registry must be accessible to the public at no charge. It must be open to all prospective registrants and managed by a non-profit organization. There must be a mechanism to ensure the validity of the registration data, and the registry should be electronically searchable. An acceptable registry must include a minimum of data elements (http://www.icmje.org/about-icmje/faqs/clinical-trials-registration/). For example, ClinicalTrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov), sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine, meets these requirements.

Protection of Human Subjects and Animals in Research

When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013. If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. An Informed Consent statement is always required from patients involved in any experiments. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.  Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the World Medical Association (2016 revision). When reporting experiments on ecosystems involving non-native species, Authors are bound to ensure compliance with the institutional and national guide for the preservation of native biodiversity.