Official Journal of the European Society of Surgical Oncology and BASO - the Association for Cancer Surgery

Editorial policy is to develop the EJSO as the premier journal of communication in the sub-specialities of cancer surgery and the relevant life sciences. Please refer to http://www.ejso.com for a full description of the Journal's editorial policies and strategies. We welcome submission of manuscripts in the fields of epidemiology and preventive aspects of oncology; diagnosis, including imaging; all aspects of therapy, including radiotherapy and chemotherapy; application of new equipment to surgical and clinical oncology; methods of assessing results of treatment; computing in relation to oncology; in the following categories:

Editorials. These may be proffered on any subject of relevance to cancer surgical practice. It should offer informed comment on an issue of topical interest. An Editorial should generally be less that 1500 words and contain no more than 10 references.

Original Articles. These will be considered on all aspects of cancer surgery and related subjects, including clinical trials, case and clinico-pathological series, audit or experimentation. Original articles are limited to 3000 words in length with a maximum of five tables or figures.

Review Articles. These will be considered on all aspects of cancer surgery. The Editors encourage the submission of reviews that offer new insights or demonstrate specific expertise on the part of the authors. Reviews are limited to 3000 words in length with a maximum of five tables or figures.

For Debate Articles. The Editors encourage the submission of well-written and well-argued articles For Debate on controversial issues of technique, practice or clinical science. Contributors are encouraged to identify authors who may be able to offer a contrary case to stimulate interest and debate.

Educational Articles. The Journal is particularly keen to promote postgraduate training and education. Discursive, informative and didactic articles will be considered by the Editors on a wide range of subjects. Authors should bear in mind the target audience and general professional readership.
Technical and "How I do it" Articles. The Editors invite descriptions of technique, with supporting evidence of efficacy and safety, for innovative procedures, operations and management strategies across the spectrum of cancer surgical practice.

Correspondence. The Editors are pleased to consider letters on any matter of contemporary interest, including those arising from previously published items in the EJSO.

Short Reports and Comments. The Editors welcome short items of up to 300 words on any topic or personal experience that may be of interest to our general readership.

Prior to Submission

The EJSO supports the principles of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE), which oblige the highest standards of practice on all participants in scientific research and publishing ( www.publicationethics.org.uk). With limited resources it is not possible to identify or be aware of all transgressions to the code of practice. Readers who identify or suspect publication fraud are asked to contact the Editors of the EJSO.

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

Randomised Controlled Trials
All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in the EJSO 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 EJSO 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 study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects of health outcomes. Health-related interventions include any intervention used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome (for example: drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, dietary interventions, and process-of-care changes). Health outcomes include any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants, including pharmacokinetic measures and adverse events. Purely observational studies (those in which the assignment of the medical intervention is not at the discretion of the investigator) will not require registration. Further information can be found at http://www.icmje.org.

Disclosure of Clinical Trial Results
In line with the position of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, the journal will not consider results posted in the same clinical trials registry in which primary registration resides to be prior publication if the results posted are presented in the form of a brief structured (less than 500 words) abstract or table. However, divulging results in other circumstances (eg, investors' meetings) is discouraged and may jeopardise consideration of the manuscript. Authors should fully disclose all posting in registries of results of the same or closely related work.

Ethics
Work on human beings that is submitted to the EJSO 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.

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.

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.

Copyright
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/wps/find/authorshome.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 : 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.

Submitting the Manuscript

Submission of Articles
Authors can also submit their articles electronically via the "Elsevier Editorial System" ( http://ees.elsevier.com/ejso). The system automatically converts source files to a single Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the article, which is used in the peer-review process. Please note that even though manuscript source files are converted to PDF at submission for the review process, these source files are needed for further processing after acceptance. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, takes place by e-mail and via the Author's homepage, removing the need for a hard-copy paper trail.

In a covering letter, please identify the person responsible for editorial correspondence (address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address). The senior author should provide to the Editor a statement of the contribution of each of the authors, along with a signed agreement of each contributor. Also include details of any previous or concurrent submission. It is also useful to state relevance, topicality, and whether any text, figures, or tables can be omitted. Receipt of all contributions is acknowledged immediately, with a reference number for enquiries.

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

Presentation of Manuscripts

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

EJSO will consider manuscripts prepared according to the Vancouver guidelines (Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical numbers. N Engl J Med 1991; 324:424-428). Authors are advised to read these guidelines, especially when deciding on who qualifies as an author. Authors may also find useful: Guidelines for writing papers. Br Med J 1991; 302:40-42. Manuscripts may be altered to meet EJSO style.

In addition to these guidelines, all authors should refer to the EJSO's guidelines for effective scientific writing, which can be found here and the journal's guidelines for clinico-pathological case series which can be found here.

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

Manuscript Format
Manuscripts containing research data generally follow the order: Introduction, Patients (or Materials) and Methods, Results, and Discussion. Start each section at the top of a new page.

Provide the following data on the title page:
Title: Concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid abbreviations and formulae where possible.
Author names and affiliations: Where the family name may be ambiguous (e.g., a double name), please indicate this clearly. Present the Authors' affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the Author's name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name, and, if available, the e-mail address of each Author.
Corresponding Author: Clearly indicate who is willing to handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication. Ensure that telephone and fax numbers (with country and area code) are provided in addition to the e-mail address and the complete postal address.
Present/permanent address: If an Author has moved since the work described in the article was done, or was visiting at the time, a "Present address"' (or "Permanent address") may be indicated as a footnote to that Author's name. The address at which the Author actually did the work must be retained as the main, affiliation address. Superscript Arabic numerals are used for such footnotes.

Abstract: A concise and factual abstract is required. (maximum length 250 words). The abstract should state briefly the purpose of the research, the principal results and major conclusions. A structured abstract is required. For this, a recent copy of the journal should be consulted. An abstract is often presented separate from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. An appropriate abstract should also be prepared for "For Debate" and Education section items.

Keywords: Immediately after the abstract provide a maximum of six keywords, to be chosen from the Medical Subject Headings from Index Medicus. 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 abstract but also in the main text after it. Ensure consistency of abbreviations throughout the article.

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

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.

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

Indicate references by number(s) in square brackets in line with the text. The actual authors can be referred to, but the reference numbers must always be given.

Number the references (numbers in square brackets) in the reference list in the order in which they appear in the text.

Examples:
Reference to a journal publication:
1. Van der Geer J, Hanraads JAJ, Lupton RA. The art of writing a scientific article. J Sci Commun 2000;163:51-9.
Reference to a book:
2. Strunk Jr W, White EB. The elements of style. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan; 1979. Reference to a chapter in an edited book:
3. Mettam GR, Adams LB. How to prepare an electronic version of your article. In: Jones BS, Smith RZ, editors. Introduction to the electronic age, New York: E-Publishing Inc; 1999, p. 281-304 Note shortened form for last page number. e.g., 51-9, and that for more than 6 Authors the first 3 should be listed followed by "et al."

Long reference lists impose a penalty on the available space and on the readability of the EJSO. References should be cited sparingly and selectively, and reference lists should generally be restricted to 30 references, other than in the case of specialist review articles.

Figure Captions, Tables, Figures and Schemes

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

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

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

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

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

Preparation of Electronic Illustrations

• Make sure you use uniform lettering and sizing of your original artwork.
• Save text in illustrations as "graphics" or enclose the font.
• Only use the following fonts in your illustrations: Arial, Courier, Helvetica, Times, Symbol.
• Number the illustrations according to their sequence in the text.
• Use a logical naming convention for your artwork files.
• Provide all illustrations as separate files and as hardcopy printouts on separate sheets.
• Provide captions to illustrations separately.
• Produce images near to the desired size of the printed version.

A detailed guide on electronic artwork is available on our website: http://authors.elsevier.com/artwork
You are urged to visit this site; some excerpts from the detailed information are given here.

Formats Regardless of the application used, when your electronic artwork is finalised, please "save as" or convert the images to one of the following formats (Note the resolution requirements for line drawings, halftones, and line/halftone combinations given below.): EPS: Vector drawings. Embed the font or save the text as "graphics". TIFF: Colour or greyscale photographs (halftones): always use a minimum of 300 dpi. TIFF: Bitmapped line drawings: use a minimum of 1000 dpi. TIFF: Combinations bitmapped line/half-tone (colour or greyscale): a minimum of 500 dpi is required. DOC, XLS or PPT: If your electronic artwork is created in any of these Microsoft Office applications please supply "as is".
Please do not:
Supply embedded graphics in your wordprocessor (spreadsheet, presentation) document;
Supply files that are optimised for screen use (like GIF, BMP, PICT, WPG); the resolution is too low;
Supply files that are too low in resolution;
Submit graphics that are disproportionately large for the content.
If, together with your accepted article, you submit usable colour figures then Elsevier will ensure, at no additional charge, that these figures will appear in colour on the Web (e.g., ScienceDirect and other sites) in addition to colour reproduction in print.

Captions Ensure that each illustration has a caption. Supply captions separately, not attached to the figure. A caption should comprise a brief title (noton 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. 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 artwork instruction pages.

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 (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 Adobe. Instructions on how to annotate PDF files will accompany the proofs. The exact system requirements are given at the Adobe site: Adobe Site 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 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.