British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery

BRITISH JOURNAL OF ORAL AND MAXILLOFACIAL SURGERY

Official Journal of the British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons

The following types of paper are published in the journal:

Full length articles: maximum length 2500 words; abstract maximum 250 words, 25 references, normally no more than 6 figures or tables (note that composite or multi-part figures are not accepted).

Short communications: maximum length 750 words; abstract maximum of 150 words, 10 references, 3 figures or tables (note that composite or multi-part figures are not accepted). Normally no more than 4 authors.

Technical notes: maximum length 500 words, 5 references, 4 figures or tables (note that composite or multi-part figures are not accepted), no abstract, no introduction or discussion. Normally no more than 4 authors.

Clinical lesson: a new type of submission of interesting clinical images will form part of the Oracle section (similar to the Minerva page of the BMJ). Authors should submit a clinical image accompanied by no more than 80 words of text and with no more than 4 authors. Images which 'tell a story' and have good educational value will be selected and one image per edition will be published on the Oracle page. These submissions should not be submitted by EES, but should be emailed directly to the Journal's Editorial Office bjoms@elsevier.com and they will be reviewed by the Associate Editor responsible for Oracle. The Associate Editor's decision whether to accept a Clinical Lesson submission is final and not negotiable.

Letters: Maximum length 400 words, 3 references, 1 figure or table. Letters about a published paper should be headed with the full reference to that paper. Original letters should have their own heading.

Review articles are usually commissioned by the editor.

Leading Articles - by invitation only: these are planned for each edition and will cover the whole remit of the specialty. They will provide up-to-date knowledge by a recognised expert in the field and are by invitation only from the editor. Length 2500 words, up to 40 references, maximum 6 figures or tables (note that composite or multi-part figures are not accepted). Please contact the Editor, Professor Peter Brennan, (peter.brennan@porthosp.nhs.uk) if you are interested in writing a leading article.

Book reviews - by invitation only.

PLEASE STATE WHICH TYPE OF PAPER YOU ARE SUBMITTING IN YOUR COVER LETTER

Online Submission of Manuscripts

http://ees.elsevier.com/bjoms/

Submission and peer review of all papers is now conducted entirely online, increasing efficiency for editors, authors, and reviewers, and enhancing publication speed. Authors are guided stepwise through the entire process, and are kept abreast of the progress of their paper at each stage. The system creates a PDF version of the submitted manuscript for peer review, revision and proofing. All correspondence, including the Editor's decision and request for revisions, is conducted by e-mail.

Authors requesting further information on online submission are strongly encouraged to view the system, including a tutorial, at http://ees.elsevier.com/bjoms. A comprehensive Author Support service is also available to answer additional enquiries, at authorsupport@elsevier.com.

The contact details for the journal's editorial office are as follows:

Mrs Jacqui Merrison
Administrative Editor
BJOMS Editorial Office
Health Sciences, Elsevier Ltd
The Boulevard
Langford Lane
Kidlington
Oxford OX5 1GB
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1865 843270
Fax: +44 (0) 1865 843992
Email: bjoms@elsevier.com

Editorial policy

The editorial office will acknowledge receipt of all material. All submissions are subject to editorial review, and all research papers will be forwarded to at least two referees for peer review. An immediate reject decision may be given for papers that are not suitable for publication in the journal. These papers are not usually sent for further peer review, though comments may be provided for the reject decision by the Editor. The Editor will not enter into any correspondence about papers not accepted.

The editors reserve the right to make editorial and literary corrections. Any opinions expressed or policies advocated do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of the editors, the publisher or BAOMS.

Online-only publication

Owing to the high volume of submissions to the journal, the Editor reserves the right to select papers for online-only publication in the electronic version of the journal at http://www.science.direct.com and http://bjoms.com. Online-only papers will be listed in the contents page of the print journal; they are fully citable and are indexed in PubMed/Medline. Authors will be informed if their paper is accepted to appear online only. The Editors decision in this regard is final.

Authorship

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.

Minor contributors and non-contributory clinicians who have allowed their patients to be used in the paper should be acknowledged at the end of the text and before the references. Normally no more than four authors should appear on a short communication, technical note or Clinical Lesson. Full length articles may contain as many authors as appropriate.

Before a paper is accepted all authors must sign the Confirmation of Authorship form (available word version) and at http://ees.elsevier.com/bjoms). Signing this form confirms that all the named authors agree to publication if the paper is accepted and that each has had significant input into the paper. The form can be downloaded and returned electronically if scanned, or the original may be posted to the Editorial Office (contact details above). It is advisable that to prevent delay this form is submitted early in the editorial process.

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.

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.

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.

Randomised controlled trials
All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery 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. The British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery 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 the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery 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.

Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent, which should be documented in your paper.

Patient confidentiality

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 consent for publication 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.

Copyright
To ensure maximum dissemination and copyright protection of material published in the journal, copyright must be explicitly transferred from authors to the British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS). The form can be signed on behalf of all authors by the corresponding author but the office must be in receipt of a signed copy of the agreement before any paper can be published. The copyright form is available on the Elsevier Editorial System website and should be posted, scanned and e-mailed, or faxed back to the Editorial Office (contact details above).

We assure you that no limitation will be put on your personal freedom to use material contained in the paper without requesting permission, provided that acknowledgement is made to the journal as the original source of publication.

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; e-mail healthpermissions@elsevier.com . Requests may also be completed online via the Elsevier homepage (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissions).

Language editing services

Papers will only be accepted when they are written in an acceptable standard of English. The editor will return any paper which is below a satisfactory standard.

Authors requiring information about language editing and copyediting services pre- and post-submission should 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 & Conditions: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/termsconditions.cws_home/termsconditions.

Manuscript preparation

Style of text
Papers should be presented in British English in the style of the journal; failure to do so may delay assessment and publication.

The title page should contain the title of the paper, the initials, name and address of each author with higher academic degrees and current positions held, followed by the name, address, fax number, and email address of the author responsible for correspondence.

The rest of the text should be set out to correspond with the format for the particular type of paper given at the beginning of this Guide. The text should be in double-line spacing with margins of 3 cm all round.

Original text and tables files should be created or converted into Microsoft Word prior to submission and uploaded into the EES system as Microsoft Word Document files. This will enable the editorial team to access the files for editing if necessary. Failure to do this could delay the acceptance of your article and the submission returned to you for resubmission in this format. Please do not upload an original PDF file into the system as these cannot be edited easily.

Three to six keywords should follow the abstract in all cases.

Abbreviations
All abbreviations should be spelt out the first time that they are used in the text.

Numerical data
Means should be accompanied by (SD) or (SEM). The ± sign is not acceptable. SD, or SEM, should be given in brackets after a mean, and % after a number. Please do not give a summary statistic (mean or median) without an indication of scatter (SD or range) or without a note of the number of observations.

References
These should be set out in the Vancouver style, superscripted in the text after punctuation marks, and numbered in the order in which they appear in the text.

Responsibility for the accuracy of references lies solely with the authors.

Examples:

Paper: Williams RW, Travess HC, Williams AC. Patients' experiences after undergoing orthognathic surgery at NHS hospitals in the south west of England. Br J Oral Maxillofac Surg 2004;42:419-31.

Chapter in a book: Pollock AV. The historical evolution of clinical research. In: Troidl H, McKneally MF, Mulder DS, Wechsler AS, McPeek B, Spitzer WO, eds. Surgical research. Basic principles and clinical practice. 3rd ed. Berlin: Springer, 1997:49-56.

Book: Graber TM, Neumann B. Removable orthodontic appliances. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1984.

Papers in electronic format: Morse SS. Factors in the emergence of infectious diseases. Emerg Infect Dis (serial online) 1995 Jan-March (cited 1996 Jan 5); 1(1):[24 screens]. Available from URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/index.htm.

For other formats see: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. Ann Intern Med 1997;126:36-47. Also available at: www.icmje.org

Unpublished data, including abstracts of papers given at meetings, should not be quoted as references but be given in parentheses in the text (as unpublished observations).

Tables
Tables should be presented in double-line spacing on separate pages, and should be submitted as Word documents, not Excel. They should be comprehensible without reference to the text. Templates for the layout of tables are available from the EES site ( http://ees.elsevier.com/bjoms/img/Templates_for_Tables.doc) and should be followed in all cases.

Statistical analysis
Statistical analyses accepted by the journal follow the principles laid down in: Lang TA, Secic M. How to report statistics in medicine. Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 1997 (available from the BMA Bookshop).

Figures
Figures of good quality should be submitted online as separate files. Composite illustrations (several pictures presented as one) are not accepted. For detailed instructions on the preparation of electronic artwork, see www.elsevier.com/artworkinstructions. Permission to reproduce illustrations should always be obtained before submission from the author and publisher, and details included with the figure legends. Figure legends should be supplied, double-spaced, on a separate page.

To help authors submit high-quality artwork early in the process, the Artwork Quality Control Tool automatically checks the submitted artwork and other file types when they are first uploaded against the artwork requirements outlined in the Artwork Instructions to Authors. Each figure/file is checked only once, so further along in the process only new uploaded files will be checked.

Colour images will appear in colour online, free of charge. In the printed journal, only those figures that make an important addition to the paper will be reproduced in colour.

Line drawings should be clear and contain no extraneous lines or other details. Labels within the drawings should start with an initial capital letter and any abbreviations should be explained in the legend.

Please make sure that photomicrographs and pictures of specimens contain a scale bar. The legends to photomicrographs should state the stain used and the original magnification.

Clinical photographs

Written consent should be obtained from the patient (or parent or guardian) for publication of any picture in which the patient is identifiable. The legend should include the words 'published with the patient's (or parent's or guardian's) consent'. (See also 'Patient Confidentiality' above.)

Graphs and histograms

These should be used only when it is not possible to display the data in any other way (for instance in tables), or when they are being used only for comparison with other series. In all cases it should be clear how many cases or patients are being studied in each group. Three-dimensional graphs and pie-charts are not acceptable.

For guidance on the preparation of graphs and figures see: Tufte ER. The visual display of quantitative information. Cheshire, CT: Graphic Press, 1983, or Jolley D. The glitter of the t table. Lancet 1993;342:27-9.

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.

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. 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. 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.

Accepted Articles
For the facility to track accepted articles and set email alerts to inform you of when an article's status has changed, visit: http://authors.elsevier.com/TrackPaper.html. There are also detailed artwork guidelines, copyright information, frequently asked questions and more. Contact details for questions arising after acceptance of an article, especially those related to proofs, are provided after registration of an article for publication.