These guidelines generally follow the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals" The complete document appears at http://www.icmje.org.

Submission to the journal
Lung Cancer is an international publication covering the clinical, translational and basic science of malignancies of the lung and chest region. Original research articles, early reports, review articles and editorials covering the prevention, epidemiology and etiology, basic biology, pathology, clinical assessment, surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, combined treatment modalities, other treatment modalities and outcomes of lung cancer are all welcome. Letters to the journals are also welcomed although authors should be aware that the majority will be published online only. Early reports should briefly describe the initial results of a research topic and will be expedited through peer-review. Manuscripts describing studies on cell lines will only be considered if the data compares at least two types of distinct cell lines and the results have general implications on the understanding of the biology of chest tumours. Authors of studies on cell lines must also agree to make freely available to other researchers any of the cells, clones of cells, or DNA or antibodies, etc, that were used in the research reported and that are not available from commercial suppliers.

All original papers submitted to Lung Cancer will be evaluated by the Journal's Editors. Some manuscripts may be rejected outright following this evaluation. Those manuscripts which are judged as being eligible for consideration by the Editors will be subject to peer-review.

Manuscripts should be submitted online at http://ees.elsevier.com/lungcancer and the instructions on this site should be closely followed. Once the manuscript has been uploaded, our system automatically generates an electronic PDF proof which is then used for reviewing. All correspondence including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, will be managed via this system. Authors may also track the progress of their paper using this system to final decision.

If you have any problems submitting to the system please contact Annabelle Thomas in the Editorial Office on Tel : +44 1392 285853 Email : annabelle.thomas@elsevier.com

In a covering letter, please identify the person responsible for editorial correspondence (address, telephone and fax numbers and e-mail address). All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, (3) final approval of the version to be submitted. A statement should also be included stating that the manuscript, including related data, figures and tables has not been published previously and that the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere. Also include the word count of your article on the cover letter and details of any previous submission. Authors should supply the names and email addresses of up to three potential reviewers for their manuscript, at least one of which must be in a different country. Please do not suggest reviewers from your own institution, previous or current collaborators, or Editorial Board members. Please do not contact any reviewers you have suggested.

Acknowledgements All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship as defined above 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 should disclose whether they had any writing assistance and identify the entity that paid for this assistance.

Randomised controlled trials All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in Lung Cancer should include a completed Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) flow chart. Please refer to the CONSORT statement website at http://www.consort-statement.org for more information. Lung Cancer also recommends that authors adopt the proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) which require, as a condition of consideration for publication of clinical trials, registration in a public trials registry. Trials must register at or before the onset of patient enrolment. The clinical trial registration number should be included at the end of the abstract of the article. For this purpose, a clinical trial is defined as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Studies designed for other purposes, such as to study pharmacokinetics or major toxicity (e.g. phase I trials) would be exempt. Further information can be found at www.icmje.org.

Ethics Work on human beings that is submitted to Lung Cancer should comply with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki; Recommendations guiding physicians in biomedical research involving human subjects. Adopted by the 18th World Medical Assembly, Helsinki, Finland, June 1964, amended by the 29th World Medical Assembly, Tokyo, Japan, October 1975, the 35th World Medical Assembly, Venice, Italy, October 1983, and the 41st World Medical Assembly, Hong Kong, September 1989. The manuscript should contain a statement that the work has been approved by the appropriate ethical committees related to the institution(s) in which it was performed and that subjects gave informed consent to the work. Studies involving experiments with animals must state that their care was in accordance with institution guidelines. Patients' and volunteers' names, initials, and hospital numbers should not be used.

Editorial Assistance, Medical Writers & Industry Sponsorship Authors must fully disclose any editorial assistance provided for the production of the article. If a medical writer participated in the production of the manuscript, the medical writer must be listed as an author. A medical writer must list all conflicts of interest including any funding or support received personally or by their company which could have influenced the production of the manuscript.

Conflict of interest When submitting their manuscript online all authors must upload a "Conflict of Interest statement" as a separate file. Within this statement all authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organisations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding.

Role of the funding source All sources of funding should be declared as an acknowledgement at the end of the text. Authors should declare the role of study sponsors, if any, in the 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. If the study sponsors had no such involvement, the authors should so state.

Supplementary data (including multimedia and video) The journal accepts electronic supplementary material to support and enhance your scientific research. Supplementary files allow the author to submit supporting applications, movies, animation sequences, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound clips and more, which will be published online alongside the electronic version of your article. In order to ensure that your submitted material is directly usable, please ensure that data is provided in one of the recommended file formats (for detailed guidance on formats for supplementary files go to http://www.elsevier.com/fileformats).

AudioSlides The journal encourages authors to create an AudioSlides presentation with their published article. AudioSlides are brief, webinar-style presentations that are shown next to the online article on ScienceDirect. This gives authors the opportunity to summarize their research in their own words and to help readers understand what the paper is about. More information and examples are available at http://www.elsevier.com/audioslides. Authors of this journal will automatically receive an invitation e-mail to create an AudioSlides presentation after acceptance of their paper.

Language of papers is English. It is required that all submitted manuscripts be written in clear, concise English.
Manuscripts should be typewritten (double spaced) with 4cm margins, and on one side of the paper only.
Letters intended for publication should be a maximum of 500 words, 10 references, and one table or figure, and should be sent to the Editor.

Structure of manuscripts
1. Manuscripts should be written in English. Authors whose native language is not English are strongly advised to have their manuscripts checked by an English-speaking colleague prior to submission.
2. Manuscripts should be typewritten, typed on one side of the paper (with numbered lines), with wide margins and double spacing throughout, i.e. also for abstracts, footnotes and references. Every page of the manuscripts, including the title page, references, tables, etc. should be numbered. However, in the text no reference should be made to page numbers; if necessary, one may refer to sections. Underline words that should be in italics, and do not underline any other words. Avoid excessive usage of italics to emphasize part of the text.
3. Manuscripts in general should be organized in the following order:
Title (should be clear, descriptive and not too long)
Name(s) of author(s)
Complete postal address(es) of affiliations
Full telephone, Fax No. and email address of the corresponding author
Present address(es) of author(s) if applicable
Complete correspondence address and email address to which the proofs should be sent
Summary, all articles should start with a brief, one paragraph abstract
Key words (indexing terms), a list of 6-8 key words must be provided with every article
Introduction
Material studied, area descriptions, methods, techniques
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Acknowledgements, Conflict of interest statement, and acknowledgement of the role of the funding source for the study.
References
Tables

Please note that it is expected that the word count of original research articles will be no more than 3000 words (excluding Abstract, Tables, Figures and References). Papers which are longer than 3000 words will be returned to the Author. Early reports will have a word count of 1500 and a limit of 2 figures.

The number of figures and/or tables submitted should be a maximum of 6.

Abstract
A concise and factual abstract of no more than 300 words is required. The abstract must be structured for original research articles and should be divided by subheadings as follows: Objectives, Materials and Methods, Results and Conclusion. The abstract should not be structured for review articles. The abstract should state briefly the purpose of the research, the principal results and major conclusions. An abstract is often presented separate from the article, so it must be able to stand alone.

4. In typing the manuscript, titles and subtitles should not be run within the text. They should be typed on a separate line, without indentation. Use lower-case lettertype.
5. Conflict of interest statement: all authors must disclose any financial or personal relationships with other people or organisations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. All sources of funding should also be declared as an acknowledgement at the end of the text. Authors should acknowledge whether they had any writing assistance and if so identify the entity that paid for this assistance.
6. SI units should be used.
7. Elsevier reserves the privilege of returning to the author for revision accepted manuscripts and illustrations which are not in the proper form given in this guide.

Figures
Line drawings (including graphs) should be submitted in a form suitable for immediate reproduction. For advice on correctly formatting electronic images, visit http://www.elsevier.com/artworkinstructions. For illustrations that cannot be submitted electronically please contact the Editorial Office. Any halftone illustrations (photographs) must be of top quality with as much contrast as possible to ensure good and accurate reproduction, with any lettering large enough to permit photographic reproduction. Figures should be numbered in Arabic numerals in order of appearance in the text, where they are referred to as Fig.1, Fig.2, etc. A scale bar should appear on the figure rather than the magnification given in the legend. Reproduction in colour will have to be approved by the Editors. The extra costs of colour reproduction will be charged to the author(s). Width of figures should be approximately twice the height, to yield an optimum printed format. All illustrations must have a legend, which should be typed on a separate page.

Tables
Should bear a short descriptive title and should also be typed on separate sheets, including legends. They should be numbered in sequence in Roman numerals.

References
Should be numbered in the order they appear within the manuscript and listed on a separate sheet; in the text they should be referred to by numbers in brackets. Literature references must consist of names and authors' initials, title of paper referred to, abbreviated title of periodical, year, the volume and first and last page numbers of the paper, the abbreviations of journal titles should conform to those adopted by List of Serial Title Word Abbreviations, CIEPS/ISDS, Paris, 1985 (ISBN 2-904938-02-8).
In the reference list, periodicals [1], single author books [2] and multi-author books [3] should accord with the following examples:
[1] Chang A, Boros L, Garrow G, Asbury R. Paclitaxel by 3-hour infusion followed by 96-hour infusion on failure in patients with refractory malignant disease. Sem Oncol 1995;22:124-7.
[2] DeVita VTJ, Hellman S, Rosenberg SA. Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology. 4th ed. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1993.
[3] Gurman AS, Kniskern DP. Family therapy outcome research: knowns and unknowns. In: Gurman AS, Kniskern DP, editors. Handbook of family therapy. New York: Brunner/Maazel, 1981:742-75.

Copyright
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to sign a "Journal Publishing Agreement'' (for more information on this and copyright see http://authors.elsevier.com). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail (or letter) will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form. If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: contact Elsevier's Rights Department, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Tel: (+1) 215 238 7869; Fax : (+1) 215 238 2239; Email healthpermissions@elsevier.com. Requests may also be completed online via the Elsevier homepage (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissions).

Proofs
One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author (if we do not have an e-mail address then paper proofs will be sent by post). Elsevier now sends PDF proofs which can be annotated; for this you will need to download Adobe Reader version 7 available free from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. Instructions on how to annotate PDF files will accompany the proofs. The exact system requirements are given at the Adobe site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrsystemreqs.html#70win.

If you do not wish to use the PDF annotations function, you may list the corrections (including replies to the Query Form) and return to Elsevier in an e-mail. Please list your corrections quoting line number. If, for any reason, this is not possible, then mark the corrections and any other comments (including replies to the Query Form) on a printout of your proof and return by fax, or scan the pages and e-mail, or by post.

Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor. We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication: please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility. Note that Elsevier may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.

Offprints
The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail or, alternatively, 25 free paper offprints. The PDF file is a watermarked version of the published article and includes a cover sheet with the journal cover image and a disclaimer outlining the terms and conditions of use. Additional paper offprints can be ordered by the authors. An order form with prices will be sent to the corresponding author.

Special Subject Repositories
Certain repositories such as PubMed Central ("PMC") are authorized under special arrangement with Elsevier to process and post certain articles. The following agreements have been established for authors whose articles have been accepted for publication in an Elsevier journal and whose underlying research is supported by one of the following funding bodies:
* National Institutes of Health. Elsevier will send a version of the author's accepted manuscript that includes author revisions following peer-review for public access posting 12 months after final publication. Because the NIH 'Public Access' policy is voluntary, authors may elect not to deposit such articles in PMC. If you wish to 'opt out' and not deposit to PMC, you may indicate this by sending an e-mail to NIHauthorrequest@elsevier.com. More information regarding the agreement between Elsevier and the National Institutes of Health can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/nihauthorrequest.

* The Wellcome Trust. Elsevier will send to PMC the version of the author's manuscript that reflects all author-agreed changes including those made post peer review, for public access posting immediately after final publication. Authors are required to initially subsidize their manuscript with fees reimbursed by the Wellcome Trust. Wellcome Trust authors, whose manuscripts are subsidized, will have the corresponding articles made free to non-subscribers on ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com) and Elsevier's electronic publishing platforms. More information regarding the agreement between Elsevier and The Wellcome Trust can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/wellcometrustauthors.

Open Access

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1. Open Access
• Articles are freely available to both subscribers and the wider public with permitted reuse
• An Open Access publication fee is payable by authors or their research funder

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To provide Open Access, this journal has a publication fee which needs to be met by the authors or their research funders for each article published Open Access. Your publication choice will have no effect on the peer review process or acceptance of submitted articles. The Open Access publication fee for this journal is 2500 USD, excluding taxes.

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