Resuscitation

Resuscitation

Guide for Authors

An interdisciplinary journal for the dissemination of clinical and basic science research relating to cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

RESUSCITATION
Guide for Authors
Resuscitation is a monthly interdisciplinary medical journal and is the official journal of the European Resuscitation Council. The papers published deal with the aetiology, pathophysiology and prevention of cardiac arrest, resuscitation training, clinical resuscitation, and experimental resuscitation research. Review articles and Letters to the Editor, particularly relating to articles previously published in Resuscitation, are welcome. We no longer publish case reports as papers but a case of exceptional interest and originality may be considered for publication if submitted in the form of a letter to the editor.

Editorial policy
The originality of content of papers submitted and the quality of the work on which they are based is the prime consideration of the editors. The paper should deal with original material, neither previously published nor being considered for publication elsewhere, except in special circumstances agreed with the Editor-in-Chief. Most papers are assigned to an editor and sent for peer review; papers may be returned to authors as accepted, for reconsideration after revision, or rejection. The reviewers name may or may not be revealed to the author(s), depending on the reviewer's preference. The decision of the Editor-in-Chief regarding acceptance or rejection is final. Papers that are not within the scope of the journal or are far below the standard for publication in Resuscitation will be rejected by the Editors without obtaining peer review. Papers that simply describe a clinical trial protocol will be rejected. Resuscitation operates a word limit for all articles as detailed in the table below. Manuscripts will be returned to the author if the word count is exceeded.

WORD LIMIT (excluding abstract and references)
Original Paper* 3000
Short Paper* 1500
Review* 4000
Commentary and Concepts* 2000
Editorial 1200

Letter to Editor 500

TABLES/ILLUSTRATION LIMIT
Original Paper* 6
Short Paper* 3
Review* 8
Commentary and Concepts* 3
Editorial 1
Letter to Editor 1

REFERENCE LIMIT
Original Paper* 40
Short Paper* 20
Review* 75
Commentary and Concepts* 20
Editorial 30
Letter to Editor 5

*option for supplementary on line materials

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

These instructions for authors can also be found on http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505959/description#description

Submission of papers
Authors must submit their original manuscript and figures online via http://ees.elsevier.com/resus which is the Elsevier web-based submission and peer-review system. You will find full instructions located on this site - a Guide for Authors and a Guide for Online Submission. Please follow these guidelines to prepare and upload your article.

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 revisions, 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 your paper through this system, please contact the Editorial Office on: e-mail: resus@elsevier.com; tel: +44 (0)1865 843620; fax: +44 (0)1865 843992.

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/copyright). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement.

Once an article has been accepted, the uncorrected provisional pdf will be published immediately online pending publication of the fully formatted final version.

Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions).

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.

Your manuscript should be submitted together with a covering letter which should be signed by the corresponding author on behalf of all authors and should include:

* A statement that all authors 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. 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 is the chair of the department who provided only general support. Authors should disclose whether they had any writing assistance and identify the entity that paid for this assistance.

* A statement that the manuscript, including related data, figures and tables, has not been published previously and that the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere.

* The names and contact addresses (including e-mail) of two potential reviewers that have not been involved in the design, performance and discussion of the data and are not a co-worker. These may or may not be used at the Editor's discretion. You may also mention persons who you would prefer not to review your paper.

Online Only Publications
Due to the large volume of submissions to the journal, letters to the Editor will be published online-only and will be listed on the contents page of a print issue.

Conflict of interest
At the end of the 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. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. If an author has no conflict of interest, state this explicitly.

Role of the funding source
All sources of funding must 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. Please see http://www.elsevier.com/funding

Randomised controlled trials
Resuscitation has adopted the proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) which requires, 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 assigns human subjects prospectively 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), and manikin or laboratory studies would be exempt. Further information can be found at www.icmje.org.

Ethics and Patient Consent
Work on human beings that is submitted to Resuscitation must 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 must 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, where appropriate, subjects gave informed consent to the work. Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should disclose to these patients whether any potential identifiable material might be available via the Internet as well as in print after publication.

Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity.

Studies involving experiments with animals must state that their care was in accordance with institution guidelines.

Structure of papers Papers must comply with the word count and figure, table and reference limit listed above.

All papers must include a separate title page documenting: authors' full names, academic and professional affiliations and complete addresses; the name and address of the corresponding author; the word count of the paper and the abstract (if applicable).

Original papers, reviews and short papers must include an abstract of no longer than 250 words. This should be a structured abstract listing the aim of the study (or review), the methods (or 'data sources' for a review), the results and the conclusion. Commentaries must include a brief abstract of no more than 100 words that summarises the key points.

Papers must be written concisely and conform to the style of Resuscitation. They should be clearly divided into sections: Introduction; Methods; Results; Discussion; Conclusions; Conflicts of Interest; Acknowledgments; References; Legends to figures. For review papers and commentaries use appropriate sub-headings instead of methods, results and discussion.

Language
All papers submitted to the Editor-in-Chief must use 'English' spelling e.g. haemodynamic, ischaemia, aetiology, oesophagus etc. Use generic names for all drugs. The term 'adrenaline' is preferred to 'epinephrine': for the first use only, 'adrenaline' should be followed by 'epinephrine' in brackets (parentheses). Similar arrangements apply to noradrenaline and norepinephrine.

Resuscitation has an international readership: keep abbreviations to a minimum and confine as much as possible to those in regular use. Too many abbreviations make reading difficult. Abbreviations of units must conform to the International System of Units (SI), for example, kg, g, mg, cm, mm, ml, mg kg-1. Plurals have the same abbreviations as used for the singular. If non-regular abbreviations are used supply a list of these with their definitions as a footnote to page 1. Do not use abbreviations of this type in the Abstract.

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/wps/find/authorsview.authors/file_formats).

Insert citations in superscript (after punctuation) and list the references on a separate sheet in numerical sequence in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text. References cited only in tables or figure legends are numbered in accordance with the sequences established by the first identification in the text of the particular figure or table. List all authors when there are six or less; when there are seven or more, list the first three, then 'et al'. Abbreviate the titles of journals according to the style used in Index Medicus. The list of journals can be found at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/terms_cond.html

The following are sample references:
Articles in Journals
1. Ross P, Nolan J, Hill E, Dawson J, Whimster F. The use of AEDs by police officers in the City of London. Resuscitation 2001;50:141-6.
2. Bernard SA, Gray TW, Buist MD, et al. Treatment of comatose survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest with induced hypothermia. N Engl J Med 2002;346:557-63.
Books
3. Armitage P. Statistical methods in medical research. London, Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1971.
Chapters
4. Phillips SJ, Whisnant JP Hypertension and stroke. In Laragh JH, Brenner BM, editors. Hypertension: Pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management. 2nd ed. New York, Raven Press, 1995: 465-78.
References to electronic publications
Working Group of the Resuscitation Council (UK). Emergency treatment of anaphylactic reactions. Guidelines for healthcare providers. London, Resuscitation Council (UK), 2008. (Accessed 11 August 2008, at http://www.resus.org.uk/pages/reaction.pdf)

Numbered references to personal communications, unpublished data or manuscripts either 'in preparation' or 'submitted for publication' are unacceptable. If essential, include this material at the appropriate place in the text. Illustrations must be in a form and condition suitable for reproduction. The illustration should bear the manuscript titles and be numbered in Arabic numerals according to the sequence of their appearance in the text, where they should be referred to as Fig. 1, Fig. 2, etc. Line-drawings should be drawn at least twice the size of their final intended appearance. Lettering should be clear and of adequate size to be legible after reduction. The extent of reduction will be determined by the publisher, but in general the same reduction will be applied to all figures in the same paper. Reproduction in colour is subject to approval by the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher. The extra costs of print colour reproduction will be charged to the author(s) although colour reproduction online is free of charge. Each illustration must have a legend that is typed with double spacing on a separate page and beginning with the number of the illustration they refer to.

Tables of numerical data are typed (also with double-spacing) on a separate page, numbered in sequence in Arabic numerals (Table 1, 2, etc.) and provided with a heading, a legend, and referred to the text as Table 1, Table 2, etc.

Authors in Japan please note: upon request, Elsevier Japan will provide authors with a list of people who can check and improve the English of their paper (before submission). Please contact our Tokyo office: Elsevier Japan, 9-15, Higashi-Azabu 1-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0044; Japan; Tel. (+81) 3-5561-5032; Fax: (+81)3-5561-5045; E-mail: info@elsevier.co.jp.

Elsevier has negotiated with several language editing companies to provide language editing services to our authors at competitive rates. Asia Science Editing, Diacritech Language Editing Services, Edanz Editing, International Science Editing, ScienceDocs Editing Services and SPI Publisher Services provide language and copy editing services globally to authors who would like assistance either before they submit an article for peer review or before it is accepted for publication. http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/languagepolishing

Statistical Methods
* Use nonparametric methods to compare groups when the distribution of the dependent variable is not normal.
* Use measures of uncertainty (e.g. confidence intervals) consistently.
* Report two-sided P values except when one-sided tests are required by study design (e.g., non-inferiority trials). Report P values larger than 0.01 to two decimal places, those between 0.01 and 0.001 to three decimal places; report P values smaller than 0.001 as P<0.001.
* All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in Resuscitation 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.

Funding body agreements and policies
Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to enable authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with potential manuscript archiving requirements as specified as conditions of their grant awards from the funding bodies:
Arthritis Research Campaign (UK)
Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
British Heart Foundation (UK)
BBSRC
Cancer Research (UK)
Chief Scientist Office
Department of Health (UK)
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
Medical Research Council (UK)
National Institutes of Health (US)
Telethon (Italy)
Wellcome Trust (UK)
To learn more about existing agreements and policies please visit http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbodies.

Authors' rights
As an author you (or your employer or institution) retain certain rights; for details access: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/authorsrights.

Author Enquiries
The facility to track accepted articles and set up e-mail alerts to inform you when an article's status changes can be found at: http://authors.elsevier.com/TrackPaper.html. There is also information on artwork guidelines, copyright information, and answers to frequently asked questions.

Proofs
One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author. Elsevier now sends PDF proofs that can be annotated; for this you will need to download Adobe Reader version 8 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. Once accepted for publication, significant changes to the article will be considered at this stage only with permission from the Editor-in-Chief. 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. Proof reading is solely your responsibility. Elsevier may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.

All questions relating to proofs should be directed to: Elsevier Ltd., Stover Court, Bampfylde Street, Exeter, Devon, EX1 2AH, UK. E mail l.machin@elsevier.com

Reprints
The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail. 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. Paper offprints can be ordered by the authors. An order form with prices will be sent to the corresponding author.