Guide for Authors

A Journal Related to Head & Neck Oncology & Pathology

Submission checklist

It is hoped that this list will be useful during the final checking of an article prior to sending it to the journal's Editor for review.

Ensure that the following items are present:
•One Author designated as corresponding Author:
E-mail address
Full postal address
Telephone(s) and fax numbers
• All necessary files have been uploaded
• Keywords (as comprehensive as possible)
• All figure captions
• All tables (including title, description, footnotes)
• The Author Form has been completed and uploaded to EES (or sent to the Editorial Office via fax)

Further considerations:
• Manuscript has been "spellchecked" and is written in good English
• Title is clear and unambiguous
• References are in the correct format for this journal
• 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 Web)
• Colour figures are clearly marked as being intended for colour reproduction on the Web (free of charge) and in print or to be reproduced in colour on the Web (free of charge) and in black-and-white in print
• If only colour on the Web is required, black and white versions of the figures are also supplied for printing purposes
• The manuscript conforms to the limits imposed on original research and review articles (2500 words for original research articles and 3000 words for review articles with a maximum of five tables and figures)

For any further information please contact the Author Support Department at authorsupport@elsevier.com

Prior to Submission

Oral Oncology will consider manuscripts prepared according to the guidelines adopted by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors ("Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals", available as a PDF from www.icmje.org). Authors are advised to read these guidelines.

Previous Publication
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the Publisher.

Online-only Publication
Due to the large number of high-quality papers submitted to Oral Oncology the time taken for accepted articles to be published in print has risen significantly. There may be a delay of many months before an accepted paper is selected for publication in a printed issue. Oral Oncology offers authors the opportunity to select online-only publication as their preferred option for publishing their paper in the journal, rather than print publication. If authors wish to do this, their paper will be published online on ScienceDirect as a paginated and fully citable electronic article. It will be listed in the contents page of a printed issue and the full citation and abstract will be published in print. The citation and abstract of the paper will also still appear in the usual abstracting and indexing databases, including PubMed/Medline, Current Contents/Clinical Medicine and the Science Citation Index.

Authors will be asked to select which publication option they would prefer when submitting their paper to the Editorial Office.

Randomised Controlled Trials
All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in Oral Oncology 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. Oral Oncology has adopted 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 Oral Oncology 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.

Patient Consent Guidelines
Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent which should be documented in your paper.
Patients have a right to privacy. Therefore, identifying information, including patients' images, names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be included in videos, recordings, written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and you have obtained written informed consent for publication in print and electronic form from the patient (or parent, guardian or next of kin where applicable). If such consent is made subject to any conditions, Elsevier must be made aware of all such conditions. Written consents must be provided to Elsevier on request.
Even where consent has been given, identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and Editors should so note.
If such consent has not been obtained, personal details of patients included in any part of the paper and in any supplementary materials (including all illustrations and videos) must be removed before submission.

Conflict of Interest
At the end of text, under a subheading "Conflict of interest statement" all authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organisations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. If there are no conflicts of interest, please state "None declared".

Role of the Funding Source
All sources of funding should be declared as an acknowledgment at the end of the text.

Authorship and Acknowledgments
All authors must be accredited on the paper and all must submit a completed Author Form with their submission. The form must be signed by all authors and can be scanned and uploaded to EES or returned to the Editorial Office via fax (+44 (0) 1865 843992). No subsequent change in authorship will be possible.

Copyright
Upon acceptance of an article, Authors will be asked to transfer copyright (for more information on copyright see http://authors.elsevier.com). This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. A letter will be sent to the corresponding Author confirming receipt of the manuscript. A form facilitating transfer of copyright will be provided.
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: phone (+1) 215 239 3804, fax (+1) 215 239 3805, e-mail healthpermissions@elsevier.com. Requests may also be completed on-line via the Elsevier homepage ( http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissions).

Authors' Rights
As an author you (or your employer or institution) retain certain rights; for details you are referred to: http://www.elsevier.com/authorsrights.

Manuscript Submission

Submission to Oral Oncology proceeds totally online. Use the following guidelines to prepare your article. Via the "Author Gateway" page of this journal ( http://authors.elsevier.com/) you will be guided stepwise through the creation and uploading of the various files. The system automatically converts source files to a single Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the article, which is used in the peer-review process. Please note that even though manuscript source files are converted to PDF at submission for the review process, these source files are needed for further processing after acceptance. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, takes place by e-mail and via the Author's homepage, removing the need for a hard-copy paper trail.

General Points

We accept most wordprocessing formats, but Word, WordPerfect or LaTeX is preferred. Always keep a backup copy of the electronic file for reference and safety. Save your files using the default extension of the program used.

It is important that the file be saved in the native format of the wordprocessor used. The text should be in single-column format. Keep the layout of the text as simple as possible. Most formatting codes will be removed and replaced on processing the article. In particular, do not use the wordprocessor's options to justify text or to hyphenate words. However, do use bold face, italics, subscripts, superscripts etc. Do not embed "graphically designed" equations or tables, but prepare these using the wordprocessor's facility. When preparing tables, if you are using a table grid, use only one grid for each individual table and not a grid for each row. If no grid is used, use tabs, not spaces, to align columns. The electronic text should be prepared in a way very similar to that of conventional manuscripts (see also the Author Gateway's Guide to Publishing with Elsevier: http://authors.elsevier.com). Do not import the figures into the text file but, instead, indicate their approximate locations directly in the electronic text and on the manuscript. See also the section on Preparation of electronic illustrations.
To avoid unnecessary errors you are strongly advised to use the "spellchecker" function of your wordprocessor.

Word Limits

Original research articles submitted to the journal must be 2500 words in length or less, with a maximum of five figures and tables. Review articles submitted to the journal must be 3000 words or less in length, with a maximum of five tables or figures.

Presentation of Manuscript

Please write your text in good English (American or British usage is accepted, but not a mixture of these). Italics are not to be used for expressions of Latin origin, for example, in vivo, et al., per se. Use decimal points (not commas); use a space for thousands (10 000 and above).

Language Polishing
Authors who require information about language editing and copyediting services pre- and post-submission please visit http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/languagepolishing or contact authorsupport@elsevier.com for more information. Please note Elsevier neither endorses nor takes responsibility for any products, goods or services offered by outside vendors through our services or in any advertising. For more information please refer to our Terms and Conditions: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/termsconditions.cws_home/termsconditions

Provide the following data on the title page:

Title: Concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid abbreviations and formulae where possible.
Author names and affiliations: Where the family name may be ambiguous (e.g., a double name), please indicate this clearly. Present the Authors' affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the Author's name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name, and, if available, the e-mail address of each Author.
Corresponding Author: Clearly indicate who is willing to handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication. Ensure that telephone and fax numbers (with country and area code) are provided in addition to the e-mail address and the complete postal address.
Present/permanent address: If an Author has moved since the work described in the article was done, or was visiting at the time, a "Present address"' (or "Permanent address") may be indicated as a footnote to that Author's name. The address at which the Author actually did the work must be retained as the main, affiliation address. Superscript Arabic numerals are used for such footnotes.
Suggestions for reviewers: Please supply the names of up to three potential reviewers for your manuscript. Please do not suggest reviewers from your own institution, previous or current collaborators. Please provide full names, addresses and email addresses of suggested reviewers. Please note: the final choice of reviewers is that of the Editor and the journal reserves the right not to use reviewers which have been accepted by the authors.

Abstract: A concise and factual abstract is required. The abstract should state briefly the purpose of the research, the principal results and major conclusions. A structured abstract is required. For this, a recent copy of the journal should be consulted. An abstract is often presented separate from the article, so it must be able to stand alone.

Keywords: Immediately after the abstract provide a maximum of ten keywords, to be chosen from the Medical Subject Headings from Index Medicus. These keywords will be used for indexing purposes. It is usually necessary to include keywords such as Oral Cancer, or Head and Neck cancer

Abbreviations: Define abbreviations or acronyms that are not standard in this field at their first occurrence in the article: in the abstract but also in the main text after it. Ensure consistency of abbreviations throughout the article.

Text: This should start on the third page and should be subdivided into the following sections: Introduction, Patients (or Materials) and Methods, Results, and Discussion.

References: Responsibility for the accuracy of bibliographic citations lies entirely with the authors.

Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). Any references cited in the abstract must be given in full. "Unpublished data" and "Personal communications" are not allowed. As an alternative, say in the text, for example, '(data not shown)' or '(Dr F.G. Tomlin, Karolinska Institute)'. Citation of a reference as "in press" implies that the item has been accepted for publication and a copy of the title page of the relevant article must be submitted.

Indicate references by superscript numbers in the text. The actual authors can be referred to, but the reference numbers must always be given. Number the references in the reference list in the order in which they appear in the text.

Examples:
1. Llewellyn CD, Johnson NW, Warnakulasuriya KAAS. Risk factors for squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity in young people - comprehensive literature review. Oral Oncol 2001;37(5):401-418.
2. Gullick WJ, Venter DJ. The c-erbB2 and its expression in human tumors. In: Waxman J, Sikora K, editors. The molecular biology of cancer. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1989. p. 38-53.
3. Scully C, Cawson RA. Medical Problems in Dentistry. 5th edition Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. 2004

For more than 6 authors that first 6 should be listed followed by "et al". For further details you are referred to "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts submitted to Biomedical Journals" (J Am Med Assoc 1997; 277 : 927-934) (see also http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/terms_cond.html).

Figure Captions, Tables, Figures and Schemes

Present these, in this order, at the end of the article. They are described in more detail below. High-resolution graphics files must always be provided separate from the main text file (see Preparation of illustrations).

Footnotes
Footnotes should be used sparingly. Number them consecutively throughout the article, using superscript Arabic numbers. Many wordprocessors build footnotes into the text, and this feature may be used. Should this not be the case, indicate the position of footnotes in the text and present the footnotes themselves on a separate sheet at the end of the article. Do not include footnotes in the Reference list.

Table footnotes
Indicate each footnote in a table with a superscript lowercase letter.

Tables
Number tables consecutively in accordance with their appearance in the text. Place footnotes to tables below the table body and indicate them with superscript lowercase letters. Avoid vertical rules. Be sparing in the use of tables and ensure that the data presented in tables do not duplicate results described elsewhere in the article.

Nomenclature and Units
Follow internationally accepted rules and conventions: use the international system of units (SI). If other quantities are mentioned, give their equivalent in SI.

Preparation of Electronic Illustrations


• Make sure you use uniform lettering and sizing of your original artwork.
• Save text in illustrations as "graphics" or enclose the font.
• Only use the following fonts in your illustrations: Arial, Courier, Helvetica, Times, Symbol.
• Number the illustrations according to their sequence in the text.
• Use a logical naming convention for your artwork files.
• Provide all illustrations as separate files and as hardcopy printouts on separate sheets.
• Provide captions to illustrations separately.
• Produce images near to the desired size of the printed version.
• A detailed guide on electronic artwork is available on our website: http://authors.elsevier.com/artwork
You are urged to visit this site; some excerpts from the detailed information are given here.

Formats
Regardless of the application used, when your electronic artwork is finalised, please "save as" or convert the images to one of the following formats (Note the resolution requirements for line drawings, halftones, and line/halftone combinations given below.):
EPS: Vector drawings. Embed the font or save the text as "graphics".
TIFF: Colour or greyscale photographs (halftones): always use a minimum of 300 dpi.
TIFF: Bitmapped line drawings: use a minimum of 1000 dpi.
TIFF: Combinations bitmapped line/half-tone (colour or greyscale): a minimum of 500 dpi is required.
DOC, XLS or PPT: If your electronic artwork is created in any of these Microsoft Office applications please supply "as is".
Please do not:
• Supply embedded graphics in your wordprocessor (spreadsheet, presentation) document;
• Supply files that are optimised for screen use (like GIF, BMP, PICT, WPG); the resolution is too low;
• Supply files that are too low in resolution;
• Submit graphics that are disproportionately large for the content.

If, together with your accepted article, you submit usable colour figures then Elsevier will ensure, at no additional charge, that these figures will appear in colour on the Web (e.g., ScienceDirect and other sites) in addition to colour reproduction in print.

Captions
Ensure that each illustration has a caption. Supply captions separately, not attached to the figure. A caption should comprise a brief title (not on the figure itself) and a description of the illustration. Keep text in the illustrations themselves to a minimum but explain all symbols and abbreviations used.

Line drawings
The lettering and symbols, as well as other details, should have proportionate dimensions, so as not to become illegible or unclear after possible reduction; in general, the figures should be designed for a reduction factor of two to three. The degree of reduction will be determined by the Publisher. Illustrations will not be enlarged. Consider the page format of the journal when designing the illustrations.
Do not use any type of shading on computer-generated illustrations.

Photographs (halftones)
Remove non-essential areas of a photograph. Do not mount photographs unless they form part of a composite figure. Where necessary, insert a scale bar in the illustration (not below it), as opposed to giving a magnification factor in the caption.
Note that photocopies of photographs are not acceptable.

Preparation of supplementary data
Elsevier accepts electronic supplementary material to support and enhance your scientific research. Supplementary files offer the Author additional possibilities to publish supporting applications, movies, animation sequences, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound clips and more. Supplementary files supplied will be published online alongside the electronic version of your article in Elsevier Web products, including ScienceDirect: http://www.sciencedirect.com. In order to ensure that your submitted material is directly usable, please ensure that data is provided in one of our recommended file formats. Authors should submit the material in electronic format together with the article and supply a concise and descriptive caption for each file. For more detailed instructions please visit our artwork instruction pages at the Author Gateway at http://authors.elsevier.com/artwork.

Special Subject Repositories
Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with potential manuscript archiving requirements as specified as conditions of their grant awards. To learn more about existing agreements and policies please visit http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbodies.

Proofs
When your manuscript is received by the Publisher it is considered to be in its final form. Proofs are not to be regarded as "drafts".
One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding Author, to be checked for typesetting/editing. No changes in, or additions to, the accepted (and subsequently edited) manuscript will be allowed at this stage. Proofreading is solely your responsibility.
Elsevier will do everything possible to get your article corrected and published as quickly and accurately as possible. In order to do this we need your help. When you receive the (PDF) proof of your article for correction, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication. Subsequent corrections will not be possible, so please ensure your first sending is complete. Note that this does not mean you have any less time to make your corrections, just that only one set of corrections will be accepted.

Author Enquiries
Visit the Author Gateway from Elsevier http://authors.elsevier.com for the facility to track accepted articles and set up e-mail alerts to inform you when an article's status changes. The Author Gateway also provides detailed artwork guidelines, copyright information, and answers to frequently asked questions.