The Breast

The Breast is an international, multidisciplinary journal for clinicians, which focuses on translational and clinical research for the advancement of breast cancer prevention and therapy. The Editors welcome the submission of original research articles, systematic reviews, viewpoint and debate articles and correspondence on all areas of pre-malignant and malignant breast disease.

Manuscript Categories

The journal publishes articles in the following categories:

Editorials: Editorials are commissioned for publication by the Editors. Authors who wish to contribute an Editorial to the journal should contact the Editorial Office (thebreast@elsevier.com) prior to writing and submitting the Editorial.
Original Research Papers: Original full-length research papers which have not been published previously, except in a preliminary form, may be submitted as regular papers. Original research papers should not exceed 3,000 words in length and should contain an abstract.
Review Articles: Review articles are welcome but should be topical and not just an overview of the literature. Review articles should not exceed 5,000 words in length and should contain an abstract.
Short Communications: Reports on important new results that fall within the scope of the journal may be submitted as short communications. These papers should not exceed 1,000 words in length and should follow the structure of an original research paper. Please note that the journal no longer accepts case reports for publication.
Viewpoints and Debate: Short commentaries of 1,500 words or less that express a personal viewpoint on technique, practice or clinical science are welcomed. Papers for this section should contain a condensed abstract to highlight the main points of the commentary. The Editors may invite another expert to publish an alternative viewpoint in the same or a subsequent issue of the journal to stimulate debate.
Letters to the Editor: Letters of 200 words or less relating to published work in The Breast are welcome. No other (unrelated) letters will be considered for publication.

General

The Breast 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 http://www.icmje.org).

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.

Upon acceptance of an article, Authors will be asked to transfer copyright (for more information on copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/authors). 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 online via the Elsevier homepage (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissions).

Online submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at http://www.ees.elsevier.com/thebreast and the instructions on the site should be closely followed. Authors may submit manuscripts and track their progress to final decision. Reviewers can download manuscripts and submit their reports to the Editors.

Author Agreement: When making your submission online you are requested to add the following statement in the Author Comments Box:I confirm that all authors have agreed to the submission of this manuscript in its present form.

Author's suggested reviewers: With their submitted manuscript, authors must provide the names and addresses of at least two reviewers for the consideration of the Editors in the COMMENTS field during the online submission.

General Points

Randomised controlled trials: All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in The Breast 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 Breast 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 http://www.icmje.org.

Ethics: Work on human beings that is submitted to The Breast 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: 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.

PRESENTATION OF MANUSCRIPTS

Papers should be submitted in journal style. Failure to do so may lead to significant delays in publication. 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. Use decimal points (not commas).

Provide the following data on the title page (in the order given).
Title: Concise and informative. The title should indicate the main point of the manuscript. Note that 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.
Acknowledgements: Collate acknowledgements in a separate section at the end of the article and do not, therefore, include them on the title page, as a footnote to the title or otherwise.

Authorship: For manuscripts with two or more authors, each author must qualify by having significantly participated in the study that is reported. Each author must make substantial contributions to first concept and design or analysis and interpretation of data and second, writing the manuscript or revising it critically for content. Others contributing to the work should be recognised separately in an Acknowledgement.

Manuscripts should be organised in the following sequence:

Summary: A concise and factual summary is required (maximum length 150 words for full-length papers or 100 words for short communications). The summary should state briefly the purpose of the research, the principal results and major conclusions. A summary is often presented separate from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. References should therefore be avoided, but if essential, they must be cited in full, without reference to the reference list. Non-standard or uncommon abbreviations should be avoided, but if essential they must be defined at their first mention in the Summary itself.

Keywords: Immediately after the Summary, provide a maximum of six keywords, using American spelling and avoiding general and plural terms and multiple concepts (avoid, for example, 'and', 'of'). Be sparing with abbreviations: only abbreviations firmly established in the field may be eligible. These keywords will be used for indexing purposes.

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

Introduction: This should give the reasons for doing the work. As this is a specialist journal a detailed review of the literature is not necessary. The Introduction should preferably conclude with a final paragraph stating concisely and clearly the Aims and Objectives of the investigation.

Materials and methods: A full technical description of a method should be given in detail only when the method is new.

Results: This need only report results of representative experiments illustrated by Tables and Figures. Use well-known statistical tests in preference to obscure ones. Consult a statistician or a statistics text for detailed advice.

Discussion: This section must not recapitulate results but should relate the authors' findings in a condensed manner in the context of other relevant related research, giving proper credit to the respective investigators. The discussion part should close with a subsection headed "conclusions", which is not to be confused with the "Summary" of the whole work.

Conclusion: The main conclusions of the study may be presented in a short Conclusions section, which may stand alone or form a subsection of a Discussion or Results and Discussion section.

Acknowledgments: 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 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 there is no conflict of interest this should be stated.

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.

References: The accuracy of references is the responsibility of the author. References should be entered consecutively by superscript Arabic numerals in the text. The reference list should be listed in numerical order on a separate sheet in double or triple spacing. References to journals should include the author's name and initials (list all authors when six or fewer, when seven or more, list only the first three and add et al), full title of the paper, journal title abbreviated using Index Medicus abbreviations, year of publication, volume number, first and last page numbers. For example:

1. Cochrane R, Gee A, Ellis H, Microscopic topography of the male breast. The Breast 1992; 1: 25-27.

2. Kleinberg DL, Noll GL, Frantz AG. Galactorrhoea: a study of 235 cases,including 48 with pituitary tumours. N Engl J Med 1977; 296: 589-600.

References to books should be as follows:

3. Haagenson CD. Disease of the Breast. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: WB Saunders, 1986, pp 173.When citing a Elsevier journal, include the digital object identifier (DOI), if noted, from the article's title page.

Units and Abbreviations: Avoid abbreviations in the Title and Summary. All unusual abbreviations should be fully explained at their first occurrence in the text. All measurements should be expressed in SI units. Imperial units are acceptable from USA contributors. For more detailed recommendations, authors may consult the Royal Society of Medicine publication entitled Units, Symbols and Abbreviations: A Guide for Biological and Medical Editors and Authors. Proprietary names of drugs, instruments, etc. should be indicated by the use of initial capital letters.

Human and non-human experimentation: Typescripts that contain the results of human and/or animal studies will only be accepted for publication if it is made clear that a high standard of ethics was applied in carrying out the investigations. In the case of invasive studies in humans, typescripts should include a statement that the research protocol was approved by a local ethical committee. 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.

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://www.elsevier.com/authors
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 http://www.elsevier.com/authors.

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.

Sponsored Articles: The Breast now offers authors the option to sponsor non-subscriber access to individual articles. The access sponsorship contribution fee per article is $3,000. This contribution is necessary to offset publishing costs – from managing article submission and peer review, to typesetting, tagging and indexing of articles, hosting articles on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs to ensure global dissemination via ScienceDirect, and permanently preserving the published journal article. The sponsorship fee excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as color charges which are additional.
Authors can specify that they would like to select this option after receiving notification that their article has been accepted for publication, but not before. This eliminates a potential conflict of interest by ensuring that the journal does not have a financial incentive to accept an article for publication.

Page 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.

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.

Business communications: Communications of a business nature should be addressed to: The Publishing Editor, The Breast, Elsevier Ltd, Health Sciences, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK, Tel: (+44) 1865 843243, Fax: (+44) 1865 843997.

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 for review. Please consult this Guide for Authors for further details of any item.

Ensure that the following items are present:
• One author designated as corresponding author
• E-mail address
• Full postal address
• Telephone and fax numbers
• All necessary files have been uploaded
• Keywords
• All figure captions
• All tables (including title, description, footnotes)

Further considerations
• Manuscript has been spell checked
• 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 or to be reproduced in black-and-white

FOR MORE INFORMATION, please contact the Author Support Department at authorsupport@elsevier.com.