PREPARING FOR SUBMISSION

Submitted manuscripts should be arranged according to the rules stated in 'Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals' Ann Intern Med 1997; 126: 36-47, or JAMA 1997; 277: 927-34. The full document is available at www.icmje.org

When submitting a paper, the author should always make a full statement to the editor about all submissions and previous reports that might be regarded as redundant or duplicate publication of the same or very similar work.

Conflict of interest and funding: Authors are responsible for recognising and disclosing financial and other conflicts of interest that might bias their work. They should acknowledge in the manuscript all financial support for the work and other financial or personal connections to the work.

Statistic validity: If statistical data are provided the authors are requested to submit an official statement issued by a certified statistician (with a proper affiliation) regarding the validity of methods used.

Ethics and consent: When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 1983. Do not use patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. Papers including animal experiments or clinical trials must be accompanied by an approval by the local ethics committee. Please give date of issue and registration number.

Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that the patient be shown the manuscript to be published.

Copyright: It is a condition of publication that authors vest copyright in their articles, including abstracts, in Informa Healthcare UK Ltd. This ensures full copyright protection and dissemination of the article, and the journal, to the widest possible readership in print and electronic formats as appropriate. Authors may, of course, use the material elsewhere after publication provided that prior permission is obtained from Informa Healthcare UK Ltd. Authors are themselves responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyright material from other sources. For more information on copyright, please see Frequently Asked Questions.

SUBMISSION
Submit 3 good quality photocopies of all written material and illustrations and retain the originals. Address manuscripts to the Editorial Office accompanied by a covering letter signed by all authors. Note in this letter if a professional linguistic reviewer has revised the manuscript.

The editors encourage submissions on a CD or diskette to facilitate rapid accessibility of your work to the readers. Please make sure that the electronic files and the printouts are identical. The CD or diskette should be labelled with your name and the name of the computer platform and version of the word processing system you have used. Please use these simple guidelines when preparing your electronic manuscript:

1. Please be consistent. The same elements should be keyed in exactly the same way throughout the manuscript.
2. Do not break words at the end of lines. Use a hyphen only to hyphenate compound words.
3. Enter only one space after the full-stop at the end of a sentence.
4. When emphasising words, please use the italic feature of your word processor software.
5. Do not justify your text; use a ragged right-hand margin.
6. Use a double hyphen (--) to indicate a dash in text.
7. Do not use the lowercase l for 1 (one) or the uppercase O for 0 (zero).
8. The space bar should only be used as a word separator. Use TAB when indenting paragraphs or separating columns in tables.

Please keep illustrations as separate files. The colour must be CMYK, not RGB; all fonts must be embedded, and the resolution of images should be of a quality suitable for printing; i.e. files downloaded from web pages are not suitable, they will look acceptable on screen but not when printed. Do not use colour files if black and white only output is required. Informa Healthcare accepts images in TIFF, JPEG and EPS.  

Manuscript layout: Manuscripts should be written in English and typed double-spaced including references, tables and figure legends, and leave generous margins. The pages should be consecutively numbered. The recommended length of an original paper is up to 4-5 printed pages (12-15 pages of typed manuscript, including tables and illustrations). Case reports should be limited to 2-3 printed pages (4-6 pages of typescript, including illustrations). Organise the paper: title page, abstract, introduction, material and methods, results, discussion, acknowledgements, references and legends to figures.

Title page: Article title, a short running title of not more than 45 characters, type of paper, name of authors (first name, middle initial and last name) and affiliations, name and full address of corresponding author.

Abstract and Key words: The abstract should not exceed 250 words for original papers and not more than 50 words for case reports. Below the abstract, authors should provide 3-10 key words.

The text in case reports should be divided under the headings: Abstract, Introduction, Case Report(s) and Discussion (s).

References: The Vancouver system must be applied. References should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text (numerical order, not alphabetical). Identify references in the text by arabic numerals [in square brackets]. Papers accepted but not yet published should be designated as (in press). The maximum number of references permitted is 25 for an Original Article and 10 for a Case Report. Abbreviations of journal titles: please consult the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus, also accessible at www.nlm.nih.gov
Set out references as in the following example:

[1] Meuli HC, Fernandez DL, Menon J. Uncemented total wrist arthroplasty. J Hand Surg 1995;20A:115-9.

[2] Lister GD. Skin flaps. In: Green DP, editor. Operative hand surgery. 3rd ed. New York: Churchill Livingstone; 1993. p 1334-60.

Tables: Type each table double-spaced on a separate sheet. Number the tables consecutively (roman numerals) and supply a brief title for each. Identify statistical measures of variations such as SD and SEM. Use asterisks for significance values. Cite each table in the text in consecutive order (roman numerals).

Illustrations: Submit unmounted illustrations in three sets. Half tone and colour photos should be professionally produced but computer-drawn figures are also accepted provided they are of high quality. Photomicrographs must have internal scale markers, and symbols, arrows or letters should contrast with the background. Figure number and arrow indicating 'top' should be indicated on the back of one set of the illustrations.

Costs for colour illustrations must be borne by the authors, (USD 1000 for the first colour page, and USD 500 per each subsequent page) but application can be made for contribution from the Society for the Publication of Acta Chirurgica Scandinavica (via the Editor).

Supplements Graduate theses, monographs or proceedings of symposia may be accepted as supplements to Scandinavian Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Hand Surgery following application to the editor. Printing and distribution costs for the required 6000 copies are borne by the authors.

Please submit your manuscript together with your CD or diskette to:

Scandinavian Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Hand Surgery
Department of Plastic Surgery
Sahlgrenska University Hospital
SE-413 45 Gteborg
Sweden
Tel:  +46-31 342 41 33 
Fax: +46-31 342 12 09
E-mail: christina.andersson@plast.gu.se