International Emergency Nursing

Guide for Authors

Online Submission
Submission to this journal proceeds totally online. Use the following guidelines to prepare your article via http://ees.elsevier.com/yaaen you will be guided stepwise through the creation and uploading of the various files. 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.

Note: electronic articles submitted for the review process may need to be edited after acceptance to follow journal standards. For this an "editable" file format is necessary. We accept most wordprocessing formats, but Word, WordPerfect or LaTeX is preferred. Although Elsevier can process most wordprocessor file formats, should your electronic file prove to be unusable, the article will be typeset from the hardcopy printout.

The above represents a very brief outline of this form of submission. It can be advantageous to print this "Guide for Authors" section from the site for reference in the subsequent stages of article preparation. Further guidance can be found in the journal's Writing for Publication Resources.

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and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the Publisher.

REVIEW POLICY
All original contributions and reports will be submitted to double-blind peer review. As an editorial team, we are committed to providing objective, rigorous and fair feedback. Comments made by referees will be provided to all authors.

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
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 organizations 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 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 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.

Changes to authorship
This policy concerns the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship of accepted manuscripts:

Before the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Requests to add or remove an author, or to rearrange the author names, must be sent to the Journal Manager from the corresponding author of the accepted manuscript and must include: (a) the reason the name should be added or removed, or the author names rearranged and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, fax, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Requests that are not sent by the corresponding author will be forwarded by the Journal Manager to the corresponding author, who must follow the procedure as described above. Note that: (1) Journal Managers will inform the Journal Editors of any such requests and (2) publication of the accepted manuscript in an online issue is suspended until authorship has been agreed.

After the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Any requests to add, delete, or rearrange author names in an article published in an online issue will follow the same policies as noted above and result in a corrigendum.

PRESENTATION OF MANUSCRIPTS

Your article (written in English) should be typed on A4 format, double-spaced with margins of at least 3cm.

Research articles and Reviews should be 2,500-5,000 words, including abstract and references. Supporting statements (Conflict of Interest, Ethical Approval, Acknowledgements) are not included in the word count.

Case studies are also welcome and these may be shorter in length.

Contemporary Issues: 1,500-2,000 words. Papers that discuss contemporary issues within emergency care, and stimulate debate, are welcomed. Authors who have ideas which address issues of substantive interest to the field, including those of a controversial nature, should consider submitting a Contemporary Issue piece. The issues must be current and, although they can be of national agenda, they must have international implications or be of relevance to an international audience. Contemporary Issues should be in editorial format, with no abstract, but with keywords and up to 8 references (following the style as outlined in this Guide). Contemporary Issues should be submitted online in the usual way for the journal.

To facilitate the review process line numbering is required in the left margin of the manuscript. (Line numbering can be added from the Page Setup or Format menu of word processing programs.) The line numbering should be continuous throughout the entire manuscript. Papers should be set out as follows:

Title Page: the title page should give the title in capital letters, below which should be the authors' names (as they are to appear) in lower-case letters. For each author you should give one first name as well as the surname and any initials.

You should give a maximum of four degrees/qualifications for each author and the current relevant appointment only. Authors' addresses should be limited to the minimum information needed to ensure accurate postal delivery; these details should be on the title page below the authors' names and appointments. Authors should also provide a daytime contact telephone number and fax number, and an email address.

Keywords: include six or ten keywords. These are to increase the likely accessibility of your paper to potential readers searching the literature. Use the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH(r)) thesaurus or Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health (CINAHL) headings where possible (see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html).

Abstract: an abstract of your manuscript, a maximum of 200 words, summarising the content, should be provided on a separate sheet following the title page.

Headings: the content of your paper should determine the headings which you use. If yours is a research paper the headings should follow the usual layout; such as: Introduction, Background/Literature, Methods, Data/Results, Discussion, Conclusions. If your paper takes another form you should use the appropriate headings, but do bear in mind that headings should facilitate reading and understanding. You should use only two kinds of headings: major headings should be indicated by underlined capital letters in the centre of the page, whereas minor headings should be underlined, have lower case letters (beginning with a capital) and begin at the left hand margin.

Tables, Illustrations and Figures
A detailed guide on electronic artwork is available on our website: http://www.elsevier.com/authors, Preparation of supplementary data. Elsevier now accepts electronic supplementary material (e-components) 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.

REFERENCE STYLE
Responsibility for the accuracy of bibliographic citations lies entirely with the authors.

Citations in the text: Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). Unpublished results and personal communications are not recommended in the reference list, but may be mentioned in the text. If these references are included in the reference list they should follow the standard reference style of the journal and should include a substitution of the publication date with either "Unpublished results" or "Personal communication" Citation of a reference as "in press" implies that the item has been accepted for publication.

In the text your references should state the author's surname and the year of publication. If there are two authors you should give both surnames. When a source has more than two authors, give the name of the first author, followed by 'et al'. In the reference list all authors' names should be included. Where a quotation is used within your paper the author, date and page number should be given, e.g.

'Pain probably disables more people than any single disease entity.' (McCaffery, 1979 p1)

List: References should be arranged first alphabetically and then further sorted chronologically if necessary. More than one reference from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the letters "a", "b", "c", etc., placed after the year of publication.

Examples:

Reference to a journal publication:
Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J.A.J., Lupton, R.A., 2000. The art of writing a scientific article. J. Sci. Commun. 163, 51-59.

Reference to a book:
Strunk Jr., W., White, E.B., 1979. The Elements of Style, third ed. Macmillan, New York.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book:
Mettam, G.R., Adams, L.B., 1999. How to prepare an electronic version of your article, in: Jones, B.S., Smith , R.Z. (Eds.), Introduction to the Electronic Age. E-Publishing Inc., New York, pp. 281-304.

Citing and listing of Web references. As a minimum, the full URL should be given. Any further information, if known (author names, dates, reference to a source publication, etc.), should also be given. Web references can be listed separately (e.g., after the reference list) under a different heading if desired, or can be included in the reference list.

PERMISSIONS TO REPRODUCE BORROWED MATERIAL Written permission to reproduce borrowed material (illustrations, tables and identifiable clinical photographs) must be obtained from the original publishers and authors, and submitted with the typescript. Borrowed material should be acknowledged in the caption in this style: Reproduced by kind permission of ... (publishers) ... from ... (reference)

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. For further information please consult http://www.elsevier.com/authors

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. 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.

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/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: 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).

AUTHOR ENQUIRIES
There is the facility to track accepted articles and set up e-mail alerts to inform you of when an article's status has changed, as well as detailed artwork guidelines, copyright information, frequently asked questions and more at: http://authors.elsevier.com/TrackPaper.html.

Contact details for questions arising after acceptance of an article, especially those relating to proofs, are provided when an article is accepted for publication.

FUNDING BODY AGREEMENTS AND POLICIES
Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow authors whose articles appear in journals published by Elsevier, 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
IEN 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 colour 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.

CHECKLIST
It is hoped that this list will be useful during the final checking of an article prior to sending it to the journal's Editor 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 fields have been uploaded
•Keywords
•All tables (including title, description, footnotes)


Further considerations
•Manuscript has been "spellchecked"
•References are in the correct format for this journal
•All references mentioned in the Reference list are cited in the text, and vice versa