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Author Guidelines

Preparing for submission Submitted manuscripts should follow the recommendations stated in  Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. Please review these guidelines.

In his/her covering letter, the corresponding author should reveal whether the submitted article – or very similar work - has been previously published, or is under consideration elsewhere.

MEO publishes three general categories of peer reviewed articles:

Feature Articles - include articles discussing issues of general interest to the health education community. For example (but are not limited to) presenting perspectives as well as reviews and commentary of the literature on a specific topic. With the exception of invited articles and editorials, feature articles are peer-reviewed.

Research Articles - present high quality completed research or evaluation studies. Research articles are peer-reviewed.

Trend Articles - present new ideas as well as studies or descriptions of programs in the early stages of development. Trend articles are envisioned as a means of quickly disseminating innovative ideas, descriptions of new programs and preliminary results from research and evaluation studies. Manuscripts submitted to this section are peer-reviewed. The preliminary nature of the material submitted will be taken into account in the review process though descriptions of new programs are expected to have at least some level of formative and summative evaluation data.

All articles go through a preliminary review by one of the managing editors. When articles are felt to not be appropriate for full peer review authors are notified at that point, usually within approximately two weeks. Articles that are felt to be appropriative for full review are assigned to a review editor and undergo full peer review by at least two but usually four to six external expert consultants. While we attempt to complete this review as quickly as possible it may take up to three months.

Letters to the Editor - MEO will also consider publishing letters to the editor which are reviewed by at least one managing editor but not set out for external peer review.

Editorials and Innovative Formats - The Editors of MEO will also consider guest editorials or other innovative formats.

If you are interested in submitting an editorial or innovative format for publication in MEO, please contact the managing editors at Editor@med-ed-online.net

Language All articles should be written in English - either British (Oxford style) or American (Chicago style) as long as consistency is observed. SI units should be used. Please subject the manuscript to professional language editing before submitting the final version if you are not a native speaker

Acknowledgements All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chairperson who provided only general support. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.

Conflict of interest and funding Authors are responsible for disclosing all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest. Please refer to the ICMJE statement on conflicts of interest. (http://www.icmje.org/ethical_4conflicts.html)

Ethics and consent When reporting experiments on patients or animals, please indicate whether the procedures followed were approved by your local ethics committee and/or in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008 (http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/17c.pdf).

Publication fee The publication of an article in Medical Education Online incurs a publication charge of 660 Euro excl. VAT (Europe), or USD 900 (rest of the world). The publication of Letter to the Editor or other Short Communication incurs a publication charge of 365 Euro excl. VAT (Europe), or USD 500 (rest of the world).

The author's university or institution may cover the publication costs for articles resulting from research undertaken at the university or institution; or money may have been earmarked in the grant or stipend the author has received to be able to carry out the research. For a list of OA-friendly universities and funders, please check here. Additional information on how to claim reimbursement/support for publication fees can be found here.

Manuscript layout Use double-spacing for all portions of the manuscript — including the title page, abstract, text, acknowledgments, references, individual tables, and legends. Wherever possible, the paper should follow the traditional layout:

Begin each section, including figure and table legends, on separate sheets; insert running page numbers.

Title page Organize the title page in the following way: 1) title of manuscript, 2) name of author(s), 3) name of department(s) and institution(s), and 4) name and full postal and email address of the corresponding author who also acts as 'Guarantor' for all parts of the paper. Please observe that the journal adheres to a 'double blind' review process and thus, the identity of the authors should remain unknown until the paper is accepted; the submitted paper should not include author name, affiliation and corresponding author address. Please see Ensuring a Blind Review

The title should be informative and accurate and at the same time trigger the interest of the reader. A short running head will be derived from the title to appear on each page of the article.

Figures Upon acceptance please supply figures/graphics/images in at least 300 dpi. For further information please see Guidelines.

If the figures/graphics/images have been taken from sources not copyrighted by the author, it is the author’s sole responsibility to secure the rights from the copyright holder to reproduce those figures/graphs/images for both worldwide print and web publication. All reproduction costs charged by the copyright holder must be borne by the author.

When figures/graphics/images are reproduced, a parenthesis should be added to the figure legend thus: (Reproduced with permission from xxx.)

Abstract Articles must include a structured abstract of 200-300 words providing sufficient information for a reader to be able to decide whether or not to proceed to the full text of the article. After the abstract, please give 5-10 key words; avoid using the same words as in the title.

Section headings Please do not number section headings. Use a maximum of three levels of headings made clear by orthographic indicators, i.e. capitals, italics, bold etc.

References should follow the standard biomedical format. ARTICLES FAILING TO FOLLOW THIS STYLE WILL BE RETURNED TO THE AUTHORS FOR CORRECTION.

Number the references consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text. Identify references in the text by Arabic numerals and in parentheses, e.g. (14).The references should be listed at the end of the manuscript as regular text. DO NOT PUT THE REFERENCE LIST IN AN END NOTE.

Information from papers in manuscript but not yet accepted should be cited in the text as 'unpublished observation(s)' or 'personal communication'.

For a key of how to abbreviate medical journal names, please consult the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus accessible at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=journals

Journals

1. Morrison S, Free KW. Writing multiple-choice test items that promote and measure critical thinking. J Nurs Educ  2001;40: 17-24.
2. May BA, Edell V, Butell S, Doughty J, Langford C. Critical thinking and clinical competence: a study of their relationship in BSN seniors. J Nurs Educ 1999;38: 100-10.

Books

1. Tesch R. Qualitative research: analysis types and software tools. New York: Falmar Press; 1999.
2. Arora M, Shrihari JS, Reddy KS. Mental health and substance abuse. In: Gupta P, Ghai OP, editors. Textbook of preventive and social medicine. 2nd ed. New Dehli (India): CBS Publishers; 2007. p. 645-72.

Website

1. Jolly P. Charting outcomes in the match: Characteristics of
   applicants who matched to their preferred specialty in the 2007 NRMP
   Main Residency Match [monograph on the Internet]. Association of
   American Medical Colleges; 2007 [downloaded 2008 April 16]. Available from: https://services.aamc.org/Publications/showfile.
   cfm?file=version95.pdf&prd_id=197&prv_id=238&pdf_id=95
2. Association of American Medical Colleges. AAMC statement on the
   physician workforce. Washington, DC: AAMC; 2006. [cited 30 June 2011] Available from: (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5zph4bd6V)

To ensure readers can access references to Web based material, MEO uses WebCite® to archive Web pages that are referenced in articles published in the Journal (see example 2 above). Archiving references is a very simple and quick process. There is no charge for the service. Please archive the Web pages you reference in your manuscript and use the archived reference in the reference section of the manuscript. The steps necessary to archive references are given below:

1. Access the WebCite® Bookmarklet Page
2. Follow the simple directions to create a "bookmarket " which will be a bookmark in your browser ( "favorites" if you are using Internet Explorer.)
3. Access each Web page you wish to reference in your manuscript and "click" the bookmarklet.
4. This will archive the page in WebCite® and provide you with a reference to the archived page.
5. Reference the WebCite® archived page in the reference section of the manuscript rather than the actual page. When your readers access the archived page, they will also be provided with a link to the actual page assuming it still exists.

We encourage you to use WebCite® for all your published references of Web pages.

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

1. I, the corresponding author, am authorized by all of my co-authors to submit this paper.
2. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
3. The article, or any part thereof, is in no way a violation of any existing original or derivative copyright.
4. The article contains nothing obscene, indecent, objectionable or libelous.
5. The submission file is in Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
6. When available, the URLs to access references online are provided, including those for open access versions of the reference. The URLs are ready to click (e.g., www.med-ed-online.net)
7. The text is double-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and the manuscript file is complete - thus all tables, figures, legends and supplemental material (if applicable) are placed at the end of the manuscript following the references. Upon acceptance - each figure and supplemental material is supplied separately in the original source file.
8. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
9. The journal adheres to a 'double blind' review process and thus the identity of the authors should remain unknown. The instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.
10. The same elements have been keyed in exactly the same way throughout the manuscript.
11. Only one space has been entered after the full-stop at the end of a sentence.
12. The text has not been justified; a ragged right-hand margin has been used.
13. A double hyphen (--) has been used to indicate a dash in text.
14. Do not use the lowercase l for 1 (one) or the uppercase O for 0 (zero)!
15. The space bar has only been used as a word separator. TAB has been used when indenting paragraphs or separating columns in tables.
16. 'Italics' or single quotes have been used for emphasis. Avoid using underlines!
17. Upon acceptance, figures and illustrations will be provided as separate files, in addition to appearing in the main manuscript file. See guidelines for preparing illustrations/figures.
18. Upon acceptance, multi-panel figures (those with parts a, b, c, d etc) will be submitted as a single composite file that contains all parts of the figure. See separate guidelines for preparing figures.
19. Upon acceptance, supplemental files will be  submitted in accordance with instructions and information is given on a separate page at the end of the main article.

Copyright Notice

Authors contributing to Medical Education Online agree to publish their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license, allowing third parties to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it, under the condition that the authors are given credit, that the work is not used for commercial purposes, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.

Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to Co-Action Publishing. However, authors are required to transfer copyrights associated with commercial use to the Publisher. Revenues from commercial sales are used to keep down the publication fees. Moreover, a major portion of the profits generated from commercial sales is placed in a fund to cover publication fees for researchers from developing nations and, in some cases, for young researchers.

Privacy Statement

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Privacy Policy Changes
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