A Multidisciplinary Journal of Oral & Craniofacial Sciences

Editors-in-Chief:

Dr G R Holland, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Professor G B Proctor, London, UK

Archives of Oral Biology is an international journal which aims to publish papers of the highest scientific quality reporting new knowledge from the orofacial region including:
• developmental biology
• cell and molecular biology
• molecular genetics
• immunology
• pathogenesis
• microbiology
• biology of dental caries and periodontal disease
• forensic dentistry
• neuroscience
• comparative anatomy
• paeleodontology


Archives of Oral Biology will also publish expert reviews and articles concerned with advancement in relevant methodologies. The journal will only consider clinical papers where they make a significant contribution to the understanding of a disease process.

These guidelines generally follow the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals

Online submission of papers

http://ees.elsevier.com/aob

Submission and peer review of all papers is now conducted entirely online. Authors are guided stepwise through the entire process, and can follow the progress of their paper. The system creates a PDF version of the submitted manuscript for peer review, revision and proofing. All correspondence, including the editors' decision and request for revisions, is conducted by e-mail. Authors requesting further information about online submission should follow the tutorial, at http://ees.elsevier.com/aob

Submission of a paper implies that it has not been published previously, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, and that if accepted it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the publisher. Each manuscript must be accompanied by a statement signed by all authors that the manuscript in its submitted form has been read and approved by them. Authors must supply details of related papers submitted or recently published elsewhere. Submissions lacking this documentation will not be reviewed until it is supplied.

Authors are invited to suggest up to three referees they consider suitable to review their submission. The suggested reviewers should not have collaborated with the authors in the last 5 years. Full postal and email addresses should be included. The editors may or may not, at their discretion, utilize these suggestions.

Authorship
All authors should have made substantial and material contributions to the paper. These would include the individuals responsible for the conception and design of the experiments and the interpretation of data. If the work was conducted using non-institutional grant funds the Principal Investigator on the funded grant should be included in the authorship. Individuals who gave purely technical help or advise, for example, on statistical tests or provided materials such as cell lines and antibodies should be included in the Acknowledgements. 'Guest' authors are unacceptable. The Acknowledgements should also include the source of the funds used and the Principal Investigator to whom they were awarded. If the manuscript has four or more authors listed, a letter describing the contribution of each should be included. Submissions lacking this documentation will not be reviewed until they are supplied.

Conflict of interest
The potential for conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author's institution), has financial or personal relationships that may influence his or her actions. Authors are specifically asked to reflect on financial conflicts of interest (such as employment, consultancy, stock ownership, honoraria and paid expert testimony) as well as other forms of conflict of interest, including personal, academic and intellectual issues. At the end of the text, under a subheading "Conflict of interest statement" all authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships that could influence 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. If there are no conflicts of interest a statement confirming such should be included

Ethics

Studies on human beings.
Such studies submitted to Archives of Oral Biology should comply with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki; Recommendations guiding physicians in biomedical research involving human subjects. The declaration was 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 ( www.wma.net/e/policy/b3.htm). 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. A copy of the institutional approval should be included. Submissions lacking these documents will not be reviewed until they are supplied. Patients' and volunteers' names, initials, and hospital numbers should not be used.

Studies on animals.
The experimental procedures and care of animals should be in accordance with the European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals used for Experimental and Other Scientific Purposes ( http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/123.htm). The authors must state that animal care was in accordance with both these and institution guidelines. Signed documents of approval by institutional committees should be included as well as a statement from the authors that the study met the standards described in the European Convention. Submissions lacking these documents will not be reviewed until they are supplied.

Copyright
Accepted papers become the copyright of the Journal and are accepted on the understanding that they have not been published, are not being considered for publication elsewhere and are subject to editorial revision. If papers closely related to the submitted manuscript have been published or submitted for publication elsewhere, the author must state this in their cover letter. Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to sign a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/authors). 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: please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions

Scientific Standards
The aim of Editors and referees is to maintain a high standard of scientific communication. Normally papers are assessed by two referees selected by the Editor, and decisions regarding acceptance are based mainly upon the advice of the referees. Where appropriate, the referees' views are forwarded to the authors for their consideration. Authors may occasionally consider referees' suggestions to be ill-conceived but if their text is misunderstood by referees it is likely to be misunderstood by readers of the journal.

Types of Contribution
Original papers and review articles are welcomed. There will be no differentiation on the basis of length into full or short communications. All submissions will be refereed. Reviews may be submitted in outline prior to full submission.

Manuscript Preparation
Papers should be as concise as possible and, in view of the international character of the journal, English usages that may present difficulties to readers whose first language is not English should be avoided. The spellings used can be British or American, but must be consistent within the manuscript. Authors should express their own findings in the past tense and use the present tense where reference is made to existing knowledge, or where the author is stating what is known or concluded. Original papers should follow the pattern of: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results or Findings, Discussion.

Authors will gain much assistance by consulting: Council of Biology Editors Style Manual Committee. Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, 6th edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

We suggest that authors consider using a language editing service to improve the English language usage and quality of a paper. A number of language editing companies will provide their services to our authors at competitive rates. Please follow this link for further details http://elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/languageediting/
The editors reserve the right to revise the wording of papers in the interest of the Journal's standards of clarity and conciseness.

General
Manuscripts must be word processed (preferably in Word format), double-spaced with wide margins and a font size of 10 or 12 points. The corresponding author should be identified (include a fax number and email address). Full postal addresses must be given for all co-authors. Please check the current style of the journal, particularly the reference style (Vancouver), and avoid excessive layout styling as most formatting codes will be removed or replaced during the processing of your article. In addition, do not use options such as automatic word breaking, justified layout, double columns or automatic paragraph numbering (especially for numbered references). The Editors reserve the right to adjust style to certain standards of uniformity. Authors should retain copies of all versions of their manuscript submitted to the journal. Authors are especially requested to be vigilant over the submission of the correct version of the manuscript at the various stages of the editorial process.

Text
Follow this order when typing manuscripts: Title, Authors, Affiliations, Abstract, Keywords, Main text (Introduction, Materials & Methods, Results, Discussion for an original paper), Acknowledgments, Appendix, References, Figure Captions and then Tables. Do not import the Figures or Tables into your text. The corresponding author should be identified with an asterisk and footnote. All other footnotes (except for table footnotes) should be identified with superscript Arabic numbers.

Title page
As titles frequently stand alone in indexes, bibliographic journals etc., and indexing of papers is, to an increasing extent, becoming computerized from key words in the titles, it is important that titles should be as concise and informative as possible. Thus the animal species to which the observations refer should always be given and it is desirable to indicate the type of method on which the observations are based, e.g. chemical, bacteriological, electron-microscopic, histochemical, etc. A "running title" of not more than 40 letters and spaces must also be supplied. A keyword index must be supplied for each paper.

Structured abstract
The paper should be prefaced by an abstract aimed at giving the entire paper in miniature. Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and should be structured as per the guidelines published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA 1995; 273: 27-34). In brief, the abstract should be divided into the following sections: (1) Objective; (2) Design - if clinical, to include setting, selection of patients, details on the intervention, outcome measures, etc.; if laboratory research, to include details on methods; (3) Results; (4) Conclusions.

Received/accepted dates
A received date will be added to all papers when they are received by the Accepting Editor. An accepted date will also be added when the papers are received at the publishing office.

Introduction
This should be a succinct statement of the problem investigated within the context of a brief review of the relevant literature. Literature directly relevant to any inferences or argument presented in the Discussion should in general be reserved for that section. The introduction may conclude with the reason for doing the work but should not state what was done nor the findings.

Materials and Methods
Enough detail must be given here so that another worker can repeat the procedures exactly. Where the materials and methods were exactly as in a previous paper, it is not necessary to repeat all the details but sufficient information must be given for the reader to comprehend what was done without having to consult the earlier work.

Authors are requested to make plain that the conditions of animal and human experimentation are as outlined in the "Ethics" and "Studies on Animals" sections above.

Results or Findings
These should be given clearly and concisely. Care should be taken to avoid drawing inferences that belong to the Discussion. Data may be presented in various forms such as histograms or tables but, in view of pressure on space, presentation of the same data in more than one form is unacceptable.

Statistical analysis
Authors should ensure that the presentation and statistical testing of data are appropriate and should seek the advice of a statistician if necessary. A number of common errors should be avoided, e.g.: -

• Use of parametric tests when non-parametric tests are required

• Inconsistencies between summary statistics and statistical tests such as giving means and standard deviations for data which were analysed with non-parametric tests.

• Multiple comparisons undertaken with multiple t tests or non-parametric equivalents rather than with analysis of variance (ANOVA) or non-parametric equivalents.

• Post hoc tests being used following an ANOVA which has yielded a non-significant result.

• Incomplete names for tests (e.g. stating "Student's t test" without qualifying it by stating "single sample", "paired" or "independent sample")

• N values being given in a way which obscures how many independent samples there were (e.g. stating simply n=50 when 10 samples/measurements were obtained from each of 5 animals/human subjects).

• Stating that P=0.000 (a figure which is generated by some computer packages). The correct statement (in this case) is P<0.0005.

Discussion
This section presents the inferences drawn from the Results: these should be recapitulated only sparingly, sufficient to make the argument clear.

References
All manuscripts should use the 'Vancouver' style for references, which should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first cited in the text and listed at the end of the paper.

For journal references, all authors should be included when there are six or fewer (first six followed by 'et al.' when seven or more), followed by the title of article, name of journal abbreviated according to Index Medicus, or left in full, year, volume, and first and last pages. For example:

1. N.P. Walsh, J.C. Montague, N. Callow and A.V. Rowlands, Saliva flow rate, total protein concentration and osmolality as potential markers of whole body hydration status during progressive acute dehydration in humans, Arch Oral Biol 49 (2) (2004), pp. 149-154.

For book references, the author(s) should be followed by the chapter title (if appropriate), editor(s) (if applicable), book title, place of publication, publisher, year and page numbers. For example:

1. A. Nanci, Ten Cate's Oral Histology: Development, Structure and Function (6th ed.), Mosby, St. Louis (2003).

Papers in the course of publication should only be entered in the references if the paper has been accepted by a journal, and then given in the standard manner in the text and list of references but with the words "In press" following the name of the journal.

Units and symbols
In general, Archives of Oral Biology will use the recommended SI (Systeme Internationale) units and symbols. The use of the litre, usually better written in full, in place of SI dm³ and ml³ in place of SI cm, will continue to be accepted. For details of the SI symbols, authors are referred to: Symbols, Signs and Abbreviations (1969) by the Royal Society of Metric and Decimal Systems in Council of Biology

Abbreviations
As Archives of Oral Biology is a journal with a multidisciplinary readership, abbreviations, except those universally understood such as mm, g, min. u.v., w/v and those listed below, should be avoided if possible. Examples of abbreviations which may be used without definition: ADP, AMP, ATP, DEAE-cellulose, DNA, RNA, EDTA, EMG, tris.
Other abbreviations used to improve legibility should be listed as a footnote on the title page. Chemical symbols may be used for elements, groups and simple compounds, but excessive use should be avoided. Abbreviations other than the above should not be used in titles.

Bacterial nomenclature
Organisms should be referred to by their scientific names according to the binomial system. When first mentioned the name should be spelt in full and in italics. Afterwards the genus should be abbreviated to its initial letter, e.g. 'S. aureus' not 'Staph. aureus'. If abbreviation is likely to cause confusion or render the intended meaning unclear, the names of microbes should be spelt in full. Only those names which were included in the Approved List of Bacterial Names, Int J Syst Bacteriol 1980; 30: 225?420 and those which have been validly published in the Int J Syst Bacteriol since 1 January 1980 have standing in nomenclature. If there is good reason to use a name that does not have standing in nomenclature, the names should be enclosed in quotation marks and an appropriate statement concerning the nomenclatural status of the name should be made in the text (for an example see Int J Syst Bacteriol 1980; 30: 547?556). When the genus alone is used as a noun or adjective, use lower case Roman not italic, e.g.'organisms were staphylococci' and 'streptococcal infection'. If the genus is specifically referred to use italics e.g. 'organisms of the genus Staphylococcus'. For genus in plural, use lower case roman e.g. 'salmonellae'; plurals may be anglicized e.g.'salmonellas'. For trivial names, use lower case Roman e.g. 'meningococcus'.

Numbers, measurements and statistics.
Numbers one to nine are spelled out unless they are measurements (e.g.5 ml). Numbers greater than nine are spelled out if they begin a sentence, or when clarity requires it. Numbers above and including 10 000 have a space, not a comma. A decimal point is preceded by a number or cypher e.g. '0.5'. Decimal points in columns should be aligned vertically. Dates are usually provided in full: 14 April 1949. Measurements may be expressed in SI or non-metric units. Use 10 ml/h rather than ml.h^-1 or ml per h.

Drugs
These should be referred to by their approved and not proprietary names; for guidance, see the British National Formulary. Where it is desirable to indicate a particular brand of preparation, the proprietary name and source should be given in parentheses after the proper name, e.g. testicular hyaluronidase (Testovase, Bovine Enterprises Ltd, London, UK).

Illustrations
In the initial online submission and review stage, authors are required to provide electronic versions of their illustrations. When an article has been accepted, authors must be prepared to provide all illustrations in electronic and camera-ready format, (suitable for reproduction, which may include reduction, without retouching).
The Artwork Quality Control Tool is now available to users of the online submission system. To help authors submit high-quality artwork early in the process, this tool checks the submitted artwork and other file types against the artwork requirements outlined in the Artwork Instructions to Authors on www.elsevier.com/arkworkinstructions. The Artwork Quality Control Tool automatically checks all artwork files when they are first uploaded. Each figure/file is checked only once, so further along in the process only new uploaded files will be checked.

General: Information relating to the preferred formats for artwork and illustrations may be found at www.elsevier.com/authors. Photographs, charts and diagrams are all to be referred to as "Figure(s)" and should be numbered consecutively in the order to which they are referred. They should accompany the manuscript, but should not be included within the text. All figures are to have a caption. Captions should be supplied on a separate page.

Line drawings: All lettering, graph lines and points on graphs should be sufficiently large and bold to permit reproduction when the diagram has been reduced to a size suitable for inclusion in the journal. Dye-line prints or photocopies are not suitable for reproduction. Do not use any type of shading on computer-generated illustrations.

Photographs: Original photographs must be supplied as they are to be reproduced (e.g. black and white or colour). If necessary, a scale should be marked on the photograph. Please note that photocopies of photographs are not acceptable.

Colour: Certain illustrations will be approved for publication in colour but only if, in the opinion of the Editors, the figures convey information not apparent in monochrome. Please note that figures supplied in colour will appear online in colour at no extra charge, even if the print version is monochrome.

Tables: Tables should be numbered consecutively and given a suitable caption. Begin each table on a separate page. Footnotes to tables should be typed below the table and referred to by superscript lowercase letters. No vertical rules should be used. Tables should not duplicate results presented elsewhere in the manuscript (e.g. in graphs).

Revised manuscripts Frequently authors are required to submit revised versions of manuscripts in the light of reports from expert reviewers and editorial comments. Revised manuscripts must clearly show revisions and authors must clearly indicate the positions of revisions in a covering letter that addresses the concerns of reviewers/ editors.

Proofs One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author which they are requested to correct and return within 48 hours. Only minor corrections are acceptable at this stage. Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. If we do not have an e-mail address then paper proofs will be sent by post. Elsevier now sends PDF proofs that 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 the 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.

Funding body agreements and policies
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.

Author enquiries
For enquiries relating to the submission of articles please visit www.elsevier.com/authors. This website provides information on article submission as well as detailed artwork guidelines, copyright information, frequently asked questions and more. Further questions may be directed to the journal editorial office: Archives of Oral Biology, Elsevier Ltd, Bampfylde Street, Exeter, EX1 2AH, UK. Email: aob@elsevier.com