Guide for Authors

Respiratory Medicine is an internationally-renowned, clinically-oriented journal, combining cutting-edge original research with state-of-the-art reviews dealing with all aspects of respiratory diseases and therapeutic interventions, but with a clear clinical relevance. The journal is an established forum for the publication of phased clinical trial work at the forefront of interventive research. As well as full-length original research papers, the journal publishes reviews, correspondence, and short reports. The Journal also publishes regular supplements on areas of special interest. Online Submission of Manuscripts
http://ees.elsevier.com/yrmed

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 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/yrmed
Authors are asked to bear in mind the guideline peer review and publication times available at the Respiratory Medicine journal homepage: click here for Journal News.

Peer Review
Submissions are allocated to a handling editor, typically an Associate Editor. Should the paper be considered suitable for peer review, appropriate reviewers will be recruited. Authors are required to provide the name and full contact details of 2 potential reviewers, though choice of reviewers is at the discretion of the handling editor.
The final decision-making responsibility lies with the handling editor, who reserves the right to reject the paper despite favourable reviews depending on the priorities of the journal.
For full details on the peer review process and current peer review decision times please click here for Journal News.

Cover letter
Corresponding authors must provide a cover letter which includes statements answering the following questions:

• Has the work been seen and approved by all co-authors?
• How is the work clinically relevant, and how does it add to existing research?
• Have papers closely related to the submitted manuscript been published or submitted for publication elsewhere? If so please provide details.

Failure to provide a cover letter addressing each of the questions above will result in the paper being returned to the author. The cover letter must be uploaded as a separate submission item.
For queries, please contact the journal editorial office directly: respiratorymedicine@elsevier.com

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.

Conflict of interest
The potential for conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author's institution), reviewer or editor has financial or personal relationships that may inappropriately influence his or her actions. Editors and reviewers for the journal are responsible for disclosing to the Chief Editor any personal or financial relationship that may bias their work during the peer review process.
Authors are specifically asked to reflect on financial conflicts of interest (such as employment, consultancy, stock ownership, honoraria and paid expert testimony) as well as other forms of conflict of interest, including personal, academic and intellectual issues.
For the 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. The Conflict of Interest Statement is a mandatory submission item: authors are required to submit the statement to proceed with their submission. Conflict of Interest statements will typically be published within the body of the article, and will appear preceding the references section. 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 Respiratory Medicine 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. Respiratory Medicine 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.

Supplementary material
Respiratory Medicine 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 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/artworkinstructions.

Ethics
Work on human beings that is submitted to Respiratory Medicine 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.

Copyright
Accepted papers become the copyright of the Journal and are accepted on the understanding that they have not been published, are not being considered for publication elsewhere and are subject to editorial revision. If papers closely related to the submitted manuscript have been published or submitted for publication elsewhere, the author must state this in their cover letter Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to sign a "Journal Publishing Agreement" (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/authors). Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail (or letter) will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form.
If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult http://www.elsevier.com/permissions. Or email healthpermissions@elsevier.com.

Manuscript submission checklist
Authors should ensure they have uploaded the following as separate items in order for the editorial office to process their submission. Failure to provide any of the mandatory items below will result in the manuscript being returned to the author.

• Cover letter (mandatory)
• Abstract (including clinical trial registration number where appropriate) (mandatory)
  
• Conflict of Interest Statement (mandatory) Manuscript including ethics statement as appropriate (mandatory)
  
• Artwork (optional)
• Supplementary files eg. datasets, video files (optional)
• Permissions letters (As necessary, see below)
• Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) flow chart as appropriate

Reviews
The journal welcomes submission of state-of-the-art reviews on important topics with a clinical relevance. Potential review authors are encouraged to contact the Deputy Editor Dr N. Hanania hanania@bcm.tmc.edu in advance with their review proposals.

Case Reports (Respiratory Medicine CME)
All case reports will henceforth no longer be considered for publication in Respiratory Medicine, but instead for the sister publication Respiratory Medicine CME. Please note that this is a separate publication to the regular journal. Case reports may be submitted for consideration for Respiratory Medicine CME via the same online submission site as for the regular journal, as described below. Authors are urged to visit Respiratory Medicine CME for specific information and acceptance criteria used.

Preparing your manuscript
Authors are asked to bear in mind the following additional points before entering the submission process.

Format and Structure
Most text formats can be accommodated, but Microsoft Word is preferable. In general, articles should conform to the conventional structure of Summary, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion and References.

Title
Your title page, should give the title in capital letters (not exceeding 100 letters), a running title (not exceeding 50 letters) and the authors' names (as they are to appear), affiliations and complete addresses, including postal (zip) codes. The author and address to whom correspondence should be sent must be clearly indicated. Please supply telephone, fax and e-mail numbers for the corresponding author.

Abstract
An abstract of your manuscript summarizing the content, at a maximum of 250 words, should be provided as a separate submission item.

Reference Format
Manuscripts should use the 'Vancouver' style for references, which should be numbered consecutively (in parentheses) in the order in which they are first cited in the text and listed at the end of the paper. For journal references, all authors should be included when there are six or less (first three only when seven or more), followed by the title of article, name of journal abbreviated according to British Standard 4148: 1975 (or left in full), year, volume, and first and last pages. For example:

1) Tockman MS, Anthonisen MD, Wright EC et al. Airways obstruction and the risk of lung cancer. Ann Intern Med 1987; 106:512-518.
For book references, the author(s) should be followed by the chapter title (if appropriate), editor(s) (if applicable), book title, place of publication, publisher, year and page numbers.
For example:
2) Colby VT, Carrington CB. Infiltrative lung disease. In: Thurlbeck WM, ed. Pathology of the Lung. New York: Thieme Medical Publishers, 1988.

Figures
Figures of good quality should be submitted online as a separate file. For detailed instructions on the preparation of electronic artwork, consult: http://www.elsevier.com/authors. Permission to reproduce illustrations should always be obtained before submission and details included with the captions.

Tables
Tables should be submitted online as a separate file, bear a short descriptive title, and be numbered in Arabic numbers. Tables should be cited in the text.

Keywords
A list of three to six keywords should be supplied: full instructions are provided when submitting the article online.

Units and Abbreviations
These should be given in SI units with the traditional equivalent in parentheses where appropriate. Conventions for abbreviations should be those detailed in Units, Symbols, and Abbreviations, available from the Royal Society of Medicine.

Language Editing
Papers will only be accepted when they are written in an acceptable standard of English. 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

Brief Communications
These should be submitted as detailed above but should not exceed 1000 words, and may normally contain only one illustration or table. Brief communications containing new information may be selected for rapid peer review and publication at the discretion of the editor and editorial board.

Permissions Information
If illustrations are borrowed from published sources, written permission must be obtained from both publisher and author, and a credit line giving the source added to the legend. If text material totalling 250 to 300 words, or any tables, are borrowed verbatim from published sources, written permission is required from both publisher and author. With shorter quotations, it is sufficient to add a bibliographic credit. Permission letters for reproduced text or illustration must accompany the manuscript. If you have been unable to obtain permission, please point this out.

Fast-track Publication
The journal aims for prompt publication of all accepted papers. Submissions containing new and particularly important data may be fast-tracked for peer review and publication; this is a limited facility and is strictly at the discretion of the Chief Editor.

Proofs
One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author which they are requested to correct and return within 48 hours. Only minor corrections are acceptable at this stage. 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.