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Surgery Today

Official Journal of the Japan Surgical Society

Publishing model:

Submission guidelines

Contents

Instructions for Authors

Prerequisites for Publication

A Certification Form, included in each issue and available from the ScholarOne Manuscripts site, must be submitted to the journal’s editorial office via ScholarOne Manuscripts. A scanned file (PDF, TIFF, or JPEG) of the original signed Certification Form should be uploaded at the same time you submit your manuscript via ScholarOne Manuscripts.

IMPORTANT: Upon receipt of a Certification Form, manuscripts are officially recognized as submissions.

Please note: No changes concerning authorship are allowed once the manuscript is accepted for publication. Secondary publication of material published in other journals or online should be prepared and submitted in accordance with the ICMJE Recommendations at: http://www.icmje.org/

This journal is committed to upholding the integrity of the scientific record. As a member of the

Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) the journal will follow the COPE guidelines on how to deal with potential acts of misconduct.

http://publicationethics.org/

Certification Form (Download pdf, 76 kB)

Ethical Standards

Manuscripts submitted for publication must contain a statement to the effect that all human and animal studies have been approved by the appropriate ethics committee/institutional review board (IRB) and have therefore been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments, along with the ethics committee/IRB approval number if obtained. If authors did not obtain an approval number, a copy of an approval document from the ethics committee/IRB should be submitted. It should also be stated clearly in the text that all persons gave their informed consent prior to their inclusion in the study. Editors may request that authors submit a copy of written informed consent. Details that might disclose the identity of the subjects under study should be omitted. The editors reserve the right to reject manuscripts that do not comply with the above-mentioned requirements. The author will be held responsible for false statements or failure to fulfill these requirements.

Clinical Trials Registration: The journal requires all clinical trials that prospectively assign human subjects to medical interventions, comparison groups, or control groups for the purpose of examining the potential health effects of such interventions, to be registered in one of several free, publicly accessible, non‐profit electronically searchable databases such as the one administered by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is located at http://www.clinicaltrials.gov.

Submitted manuscripts must include the unique registration number in the abstract as evidence of

registration. For details regarding the required minimal registration data set, please go to the

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) site at http://www.icmje.org/#clin_trials.

The journal accepts registration in the following registries:

‐ http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ (Clinical Trials)

‐ http://actr.org.au (Australian Clinical Trials Registry)

‐ http://isrctn.org (ISRCTN Register)

‐ http://www.trialregister.nl/trialreg/index.asp (Netherlands Trial Register)

‐ http://www.umin.ac.jp/ctr (UMIN Clinical Trials Registry)

Potential Conflict of Interest: Authors must indicate whether or not they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. They should also state that they have full control of all primary data and that they agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested. Therefore the manuscript must be accompanied by the “Conflict of Interest Disclosure Statement”. This form can be obtained from http://www.springer.com/journal/595/

In a manuscript submitted to Surgery Today, all disclosures should be inserted by the corresponding author in the “Conflict of Interest Statement” before the reference list, as shown in the following example.

Conflict of Interest Statement

A (author name) serves as a consultant to Z (entity name); B’s spouse is chairman of Y; C received a research grant from X; D received lecture fees from V; E holds a patent on U; F has been reimbursed by T for attending several conferences; G received honoraria for writing promotional material for S; H has no conflict of interest.

Conflict of Interest form (Download pdf, 49 kB)

Manuscript Submission

Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before; that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else; that its publication has been approved by all co-authors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – at the institute where the work has been carried out. The publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Permissions: Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Online Submission: Authors should submit their manuscripts to Surgery Today online. Electronic submission substantially reduces the editorial processing and reviewing times and shortens overall publication times. Please log in directly at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/st and upload your manuscript following the instructions given on the screen. Please use the Help option to see the most recently updated system requirements.

If you are unable to submit your manuscript via ScholarOne Manuscripts, please contact the editorial office:

Japan Surgical Society, World Trade Center Building South Tower 11F, 2-4-1 Hamamatsu-cho, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-5111, Japan. e-mail: journal@jssoc.or.jp

Manuscript Preparation

Incomplete or improperly prepared manuscripts will be returned to authors without review.

Text Formatting: Manuscripts should be submitted in Word. Save your file in docx format (Word 2007 or higher) or doc format (older Word versions). Manuscripts must be double-spaced with wide margins throughout. Use a normal, plain font (e.g., 10-point Times Roman) for text. To number the pages, use the automatic page-numbering function. Do not use field functions. Use tab stops or other commands for indents, not the space bar. Use the table function, not spreadsheets, to make tables. Abstract, text, acknowledgments, references, tables, legends, and figures should begin on separate pages and follow in that order. Define abbreviations at first appearance and use them consistently thereafter, and avoid their use in the title and abstract. Use generic names of drugs.

Headings: Please use no more than three levels of displayed headings.

Footnotes: Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables. Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols. Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

Title page: A separate title page should be provided, and it should include:

- The full name(s) of the author(s)

- A brief, specific, and informative title

- The affiliation(s) and address(es) of the author(s)

- The e-mail address, telephone, and fax numbers of the corresponding author

- The article type: Review Article, Original Article (Clinical Original or Experimental Original), Short Communication, How to Do It, or Letter to the Editor.

- 3–5 key words or phrases for indexing

Review Article and Original Article: The abstract should not exceed 200 words, and should be arranged under the following subheadings for original articles: Purpose; Methods; Results; and Conclusion(s). The text of original articles should be divided into the following sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.

Short Communication: To be presented without subdivision into sections such as Methods, Results, etc., the manuscript should not exceed 9 typed pages with no more than 2 figures (or tables), including an abstract of a maximum 150 words and 3 key words for indexing.

How to Do It: This section includes short articles on methods or techniques recommendable for practical surgery. Articles should not exceed 9 manuscript pages with 4 figures (or tables), including an abstract of a maximum of 150 words and 3 key words for indexing.

Letters to the Editor: A letter must not exceed 500 words including references. The Editorial Board has the right to accept or reject any letter. It is understood that, if accepted, letters may be edited so long as the writer’s views are not misrepresented.

References: Number references consecutively in the order cited in the text, not alphabetically. Identify references in text, tables, and legends by Arabic numerals in square brackets on the line. Examples:

- Ames et al. [1] reported…

- Negotiation research spans many disciplines [3].

- This result was later contradicted by Becker and Seligman [5].

- This effect has been widely studied [1–3, 7].

The list of references should only include works that are cited in the text and that have been published or accepted for publication. Accuracy of reference data is the author’s responsibility. Personal communications and unpublished data should be cited in parentheses in the text. If such a citation is from someone other than the authors, a letter should be submitted in which the direct quotation is given with the author’s signature.

Provide inclusive page numbers for all references. In citation of articles list the first six authors only, and add “et al” if there are seven or more authors. Journal titles should be abbreviated according to Index Medicus. For papers written in Japanese, follow the style of example 2. If such a paper has an English abstract, see example 3. For papers cited only by DOI, see example 4.

Examples:

1. Mulford DK, Dawson AE. Atypia in fine-needle aspiration cytology of nonpalpable and palpable mammographically detected breast lesions. Acta Cytol. 1994; 38:9–17.

2. Nakajima T. Tabular analysis of 10 000 cases of gastric cancer in the Cancer Institute Hospital (in Japanese). Gan to Kagakuryoho (Jpn J Cancer Chemother). 1994; 21:1813–97.

3. Imada T, Takehana T, Rino Y, Suzuki M, Takahashi M, Chin C, et al. Indications for pylorus-preserving gastrectomy for early gastric cancer (in Japanese with English abstract). Nihon Syokakigeka Gakkaizasshi (Jpn J Gastroenterol Surg). 1995; 28:2248–55.

4. Mitchell AJ, Vaze A, Rao S. Clinical diagnosis of depression in primary care: a meta-analysis. Lancet. 2009; doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60879-5.

5. Watanabe H, Jass JR, Sobin LH. Histopathological typing of oesophageal and gastric tumours, 2nd ed. Berlin Heidelberg New York: Springer; 1990. p. 23.

6. Wyatt JI. Helicobacter pylori, duodenitis and duodenal ulceration. In: Rathbone BJ, Heatley RV, editors. Helicobacter pylori and gastroduodenal disease. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell; 1992. p. 140–9.

7. Doe J. Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. 1999. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Figures: All figures should be cited in the text and numbered consecutively throughout. The height and thickness of letters and numbers in illustrations must be legible when the figures are reduced. Figure parts should be identified by lowercase roman letters (a, b, etc.). If illustrations are supplied with uppercase labeling, lowercase letters will still be used in the figure legends and citations. Figure legends should be typed on a separate page. If a figure has been published previously, acknowledge its source and submit written permission of author and publisher. The previously published source should also be included in the list of references.

Color illustrations will be accepted. Publication of color illustrations is free of charge, both in print and online. For more information about preparing illustrations, please refer to the artwork guidelines available at the end of this document.

Tables: Tables should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order. Each table should be given a number using Arabic numerals and a brief informative title, and should appear on a separate page. Explain in footnotes all abbreviations used. Identify any previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference at the end of the table footnotes. Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lowercase letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data) and included beneath the table body.

Electronic Supplementary Material: Electronic supplementary material will be published in the online version only. It may consist of

- Information that cannot be printed: animations, video clips, sound recordings

- Information that is more convenient in electronic form: sequences, spectral data, etc.

- Large original data, e.g. additional tables, illustrations, etc.

If supplying any supplementary material, the text must make specific mention of the material as a citation, similar to that of figures and tables. Refer to the supplementary files as “Online Resource”, e.g., "... as shown in the animation (Online Resource 3)", “... additional data are given in Online Resource 4”. Name the files consecutively, e.g. “ESM_3.mpg”, “ESM_4.pdf”. For each supplementary material, please supply a concise caption describing the content of the file.

Electronic supplementary material will be published as received from the author without any conversion, editing, or reformatting. For more information about preparing electronic supplementary material, please refer to the electronic supplementary material guidelines at the end of this document.

Acknowledgments and Funding Information

Acknowledgments of people, grants, funds, etc. should be placed in a separate section before the reference list. The names of funding organizations should be written in full. In addition, please provide the funding information in a separate step of the submission process in the peer review system. Funder names should preferably be selected from the standardized list you will see during submission. If the funding institution you need is not listed, it can be entered as free text. Funding information will be published as searchable metadata for the accepted article, whereas acknowledgements are published within the paper.

After Acceptance

Upon acceptance of your article you will receive a link to the special Author Query Application at Springer’s web page where you can sign the Copyright Transfer Statement online and indicate whether you wish to order OpenChoice, or offprints. Once the Author Query Application has been completed, your article will be processed and you will receive the proofs.

OpenChoice: In addition to the normal publication process (whereby an article is submitted to the journal and access to that article is granted to customers who have purchased a subscription), Springer provides an alternative publishing option: Springer OpenChoice. A Springer OpenChoice article receives all the benefits of a regular subscription-based article, but in addition is made available publicly through Springer’s online platform SpringerLink.

Springer OpenChoice [http://springer.com/openchoice]

Copyright Transfer: Authors will be asked to transfer copyright of their articles to Springer Japan. This will ensure the widest possible protection and dissemination of information under copyright laws. OpenChoice articles do not require transfer of copyright as the copyright remains with the author. In opting for open access, the author(s) agree to publish the article under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Fees and Offprints: There is no publication charge for articles. Offprints can be ordered by the corresponding author.

Proofreading: The purpose of the proof is to check for typesetting or conversion errors and the completeness and accuracy of the text, tables and figures. Substantial changes in content, e.g., new results, corrected values, title and authorship, are not allowed without the approval of the editor responsible. After online publication, further changes can only be made in the form of an Erratum, which will be hyperlinked to the article.

The Editors reserve the right to make minor revisions in manuscripts accepted for publication, in the interest of clarity, consistency, and readability. However, they cannot accept responsibility for opinions expressed by contributors.

English script and rewrite are under the supervision of Amanda Tompson, Sydney, Australia, and Brian T. Quinn, Fukuoka, Japan.

Online First: The article will be published online after receipt of the corrected proofs. This is the official first publication citable with the DOI. After release of the printed version, the paper can also be cited by issue and page numbers.

Artwork Guidelines

Electronic Figure Submission:

- Supply all figures electronically.

- For vector graphics, the preferred format is EPS; for halftones, please use TIFF format. MS Office files are also acceptable.

- Vector graphics containing fonts must have the fonts embedded in the files.

- Name your figure files with "Fig" and the figure number, e.g., Fig1.eps.

Line Art:

- Definition: black and white graphic with no shading.

- Do not use faint lines and/or lettering and check that all lines and lettering within the figures are legible at final size.

- All lines should be at least 0.1 mm (0.3 pt) wide.

- Scanned line drawings and line drawings in bitmap format should have a minimum resolution of 1200 dpi.

Halftone Art:

- Definition: photographs, drawings, or paintings with fine shading, etc.

- If any magnification is used in the photographs, indicate this by using scale bars within the figures themselves.

- Halftones should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi.

Combination Art:

- Definition: a combination of halftone and line art, e.g., halftones containing line drawing, extensive lettering, color diagrams, etc.

- Combination artwork should have a minimum resolution of 600 dpi.

Color Art:

- Color art is free of charge for both print and online publication.

- If black and white will be shown in the print version, make sure that the main information will still be visible. Many colors are not distinguishable from one another when converted to black and white. A simple way to check this is to make a xerographic copy to see if the necessary distinctions between the different colors are still apparent.

- If the figures will be printed in black and white, do not refer to color in the captions.

- Color illustrations should be submitted as RGB (8 bits per channel).

Figure Lettering:

- To add lettering, it is best to use Helvetica or Arial (sans serif fonts).

- Keep lettering consistently sized throughout your final-sized artwork, usually about 2–3 mm (8–12 pt).

- Variance of type size within an illustration should be minimal, e.g., do not use 8-pt type on an axis and 20-pt type for the axis label.

- Avoid effects such as shading, outline letters, etc.

- Do not include titles or captions into your illustrations.

Figure Numbering:

- All figures are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.

- Figures should always be cited in the text in consecutive numerical order.

- Figure parts should be denoted by lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.).

- If an appendix appears in your article/chapter and it contains one or more figures, continue the consecutive numbering of the main text. Do not number the appendix figures, "A1, A2, A3, etc." Figures in online appendices (Electronic supplementary Material) should, however, be numbered separately.

Figure Captions:

- Each figure should have a concise caption describing accurately what the figure depicts. Include the captions in the text file of the manuscript, not in the figure file.

- Figure captions begin with the term Fig. in bold type, followed by the figure number, also in bold type.

- No punctuation is to be included after the number, nor is any punctuation to be placed at the end of the caption.

- Identify all elements found in the figure in the figure caption; and use boxes, circles, etc., as coordinate points in graphs.

- Identify previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference citation at the end of the figure caption.

Figure Placement and Size:

- When preparing your figures, size figures to fit in the column width.

- Figures should be 39 mm, 84 mm, 129 mm, or 174 mm wide and not higher than 234 mm.

- The publisher reserves the right to reduce or enlarge figures.

Permissions:

If you include figures that have already been published elsewhere, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format. Please be aware that some publishers do not grant electronic rights for free and that Springer will not be able to refund any costs that may have occurred to receive these permissions. In such cases, material from other sources should be used.

Accessibility:

In order to give people of all abilities and disabilities access to the content of your figures, please make sure that

- All figures have descriptive captions (blind users could then use a text-to-speech software or a text-to-Braille hardware)

- Patterns are used instead or in addition to colors for conveying information (color-blind users would then be able to distinguish the visual elements)

- Any figure lettering has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.

Electronic Supplementary Material Guidelines

Submission:

- Supply all supplementary material in standard file formats.

- To accommodate user downloads, please keep in mind that larger-sized files may require very long download times and that some users may experience other problems during downloading.

Audio, Video, and Animations:

- Always use MPEG-1 (.mpg) format.

Text and Presentations:

- Submit your material in PDF format; .doc or .ppt files are not suitable for long-term viability.

- A collection of figures may also be combined in a PDF file.

Spreadsheets:

- Spreadsheets should be converted to PDF if no interaction with the data is intended.

- If the readers should be encouraged to make their own calculations, spreadsheets should be submitted as .xls files (MS Excel).

Collecting Multiple Files:

- It is possible to collect multiple files in a .zip or .gz file.

Accessibility:

In order to give people of all abilities and disabilities access to the content of your supplementary files, please make sure that

- The manuscript contains a descriptive caption for each supplementary material

- Video files do not contain anything that flashes more than three times per second (so that users prone to seizures caused by such effects are not put at risk)

Submission information

Please prepare your manuscript following the detailed Instructions for Authors for this journal. They can be accessed from the For Authors and Editors Link Section on the right hand side of this page.

Please make sure to provide the following information with your manuscript:

  • E-mail address
  • Full postal address
  • Telephone and fax numbers

Open access publishing

To find out more about publishing your work Open Access in Surgery Today, including information on fees, funding and licenses, visit our Open access publishing page.

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