The international journal of cancer epidemiology, detection and prevention
Formerly known as Cancer Detection and Prevention
Please visit our website at http://www.cancerepidemiology.net

Cancer Epidemiology accepts the following article types for publication:

Research Articles: Research articles which have not been published previously, except in a preliminary form, may be submitted as original full length research papers or short communications.

Review Articles: Review articles which are topical and are a critical assessment of any aspect of cancer epidemiology, detection and prevention are welcome.

Debate Articles: Short review-style articles which express a viewpoint are welcomed. The Editors may invite another expert to publish an alternative viewpoint in the same or a subsequent issue of the journal to stimulate debate. Authors who are considering submitting a debate article should contact the Editor-in-Chief with a brief outline of the proposed article before submission. The Editor-in-Chief can be contacted at cancerepi@elsevier.com.

Letters to the Editor: Letters to the Editor relating to published work in Cancer Epidemiology are welcome. Letters should be closely related to the contents of the article they refer to. No other (unrelated) letters will be considered for publication.

Commentary or Editorial: Authors who are considering submitting a commentary or editorial should contact the Editor-in-Chief with a brief outline of the proposed contribution before submission. Commentaries are welcome on any topic; however, they may also be related to published work previously published in Cancer Epidemiology but with a broader scope than letters. The Editor-in-Chief can be contacted at cancerepi@elsevier.com.

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'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 files have been uploaded
• Keywords
• All figure captions
• 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
• 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 on the Web (free of charge) and in print or to be reproduced in colour on the Web (free of charge) and in black-and-white in print
• If only colour on the Web is required, black and white versions of the figures are also supplied for printing purposes

For any further information please contact the Author Support Department at authorsupport@elsevier.com

Prior to Submission

Cancer Epidemiology 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). Authors are advised to read these guidelines.

All manuscripts submitted to Cancer Epidemiology are subject to peer-review. Authors may request fast-track peer-review in the covering letter which accompanies the manuscript. Fast-track peer-review is at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief and authors must provide a justification for requesting this in their covering letter. Manuscripts which are not selected for fast-track peer-review will automatically be reviewed through the journal?s usual procedure. Authors must indicate whether they would like the manuscript to be rejected if it is not accepted for fast-track peer-review.

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 Cancer Epidemiology 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. Cancer Epidemiology 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 (e.g. 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 Cancer Epidemiology 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.

Observational studies must comply with the guidelines for reporting as outlined in the STROBE statement (von Elm et al. The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) statement: guidelines for reporting observational studies. Lancet 2007; 370:1453-7). More information can be found at http://www.strobe-statement.org/.

Conflict of Interest
At the end of 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.

Role of the Funding Source
All sources of funding should be declared as an acknowledgment at the end of the text.

Copyright
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, Oxford, UK: phone +44 (0) 1865 843830, e-mail permissions@elsevier.com. Requests may also be completed on-line via the Elsevier homepage ( http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissions).

Authors' Rights
As an author you (or your employer or institution) retain certain rights; for details you are referred to: http://www.elsevier.com/authorsrights.

Manuscript Submission
Submission to this journal proceeds totally online. Use the following guidelines to prepare your article. Via the homepage of this journal ( http://ees.elsevier.com/cdp) 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. Authors may upload the manuscript, figures and tables as one file, but should note that the individual source files may be needed for production if the manuscript is accepted for publication. 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.

Presentation of Manuscript
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, et al., per se. Use decimal points (not commas); use a space for thousands (10 000 and above).

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

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. 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.

Keywords: Immediately after the abstract provide a maximum of ten 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.

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 superscript numbers in the text. The actual authors can be referred to, but the reference numbers must always be given.
Number the references in the reference list in the order in which they appear in the text.
Examples:
1. Llewellyn CD, Johnson NW, Warnakulasuriya KAAS. Risk factors for squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity in young people - comprehensive literature revie. Oral Oncol 2001;37(5):401-418.
2. Gullick WJ, Venter DJ. The c-erbB2 and its expression in human tumors. In: Waxman J, Sikora K, editors. The molecular biology of cancer. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1989. p. 38-53.
3. Scully C, Cawson RA. Medical Problems in Dentistry. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. 1998
For more than 6 authors the first 6 should be listed followed by "et al". For further details you are referred to "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts submitted to Biomedical Journals" (J Am Med Assoc 1997; 277 : 927-934) (see also http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/terms_cond.html).

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.

Proofs
When your manuscript is received by the Publisher it is considered to be in its final form. Proofs are not to be regarded as "drafts".
One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding Author, to be checked for typesetting/editing. No changes in, or additions to, the accepted (and subsequently edited) manuscript will be allowed at this stage. Proofreading is solely your responsibility.
Elsevier will do everything possible to get your article corrected and published as quickly and accurately as possible. In order to do this we need your help. When you receive the (PDF) proof of your article for correction, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication. Subsequent corrections will not be possible, so please ensure your first sending is complete. Note that this does not mean you have any less time to make your corrections, just that only one set of corrections will be accepted.

Author Enquiries
The facility to track accepted articles and set up e-mail alerts to inform you when an article's status changes can be found at: http://authors.elsevier.com/TrackPaper.html There is also information on artwork guidelines, copyright information, and answers to frequently asked questions.

Electronic Offprints (e-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.