All manuscripts must be submitted through the Journal’s online submission platform, ScholarOne Manuscripts, at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pdm. The following must be included with the submitted manuscript:
Cover Letter — each manuscript should be accompanied by a cover letter addressing the following:
- The primary author attests to the original nature of the material, that the paper has not been published elsewhere, and is not under consideration by any other publication
- If the paper has been, or is to be presented in a forum orally or as a poster, indicate the title of the forum, sponsoring institution, and the date of presentation.
- The authors retain copyright of their articles accepted for publication, while granting WADEM either an exclusive license to publish, or a non-exclusive license to publish (in the case of the Gold OA option).
- The institution(s) in which the work was performed, the sponsoring institution(s), and the respective departments are noted.
- The name of the author to whom any correspondence should be directed, along with correspondence street address and email address.
- Three to five keywords or phrases in alphabetical order separated by semicolons to facilitate indexing or electronic searches. Use the US National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh) to develop these keywords or phrases.
Title Page — includes the title of the paper, first names, middle initials, last names, and highest academic degrees of all authors (abbreviated as MD, MPH, etc.), along with institutions each author is affiliated with and a competing interest statement for each author. Reiterate from the cover letter the name of the author to whom any correspondence should be directed, and the street address and email address. Do not indicate author names or institutions anywhere in the manuscript other than on the title page.
General Formatting Guidelines
File Format—please submit manuscripts as WORD or Rich Text Format files. DO NOT SUBMIT AS PDFs.
Language—all manuscripts must be submitted in standard English.
Type Style—use Times New Roman 12-point font. Double space all text, including references. Left-justify the text; leave right margins unjustified.
Abbreviations—provide a list of abbreviations used more than once and what they stand for at the beginning of the manuscript (example: WHO: World Health Organization). When abbreviations are first used, they must be noted within the abstract and main manuscript with the abbreviated term fully spelled with the abbreviation following in parentheses. For example, World Health Organization (WHO).
Generic Names—use generic names. Brand names may be indicated in the Methods section and the name and location of the manufacturer must be provided in parentheses followed by a generic description of the medication, drug, product, or equipment.
Software and Equipment Descriptions—specify version number, name, manufacturer or developer of all software and equipment used for the research or to which referred in the manuscript. Include the city, state or province and country in which the manufacturer or developer is headquartered. Example: the data were entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet Version 7.0.25 (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington, USA).
Human and Animal Research Ethics Review Description—Regardless of category of submission, all research that includes human or animal subjects (including survey research and field reports) must be submitted to an independent Research Ethics Review Committee for approval. The Ethics Committee name and the protocol number assigned the research must be reported in the Methods section of the manuscript.
DATA - Numbers and Percentages—both numbers and percentages should be presented in the text, in the “n (%)” format.
Mean and Median —when presenting means and standard deviations in the text, the mean (SD) format should be used, rather than the ± format. All outcome data presented as means, percentages, and proportions must have accompanying 95% confidence intervals reported; and medians must have 25%/75% interquartile ranges. Data presented as medians must have accompanying 25%/75% InterQuartile Ranges. Statistical tests, when used, must be identified and the specific data to which each test is applied must be noted (in the Methods section).
References
References must be cited in the References section at the end of the manuscript in the order in which they appear in the text. Do not use automatic numbering, and remove any formatting (such as that from EndNote) linking the reference to citations in the text. References should not be formatted as footnotes. All references must be cited by superscript Arabic numbers in the text, tables, and legends for illustrations. Citations in the text should be placed after punctuation such as periods or commas. Titles of journals referenced must be annotated using US National Library of Medicine abbreviations (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog) and must be italicized. If there is no US National Library of Medicine abbreviation, please do not abbreviate the journal title. Include volume and issue numbers when possible, and do not omit digits from inclusive page numbers. The following is the format for references:
Journal Articles—White SJ, Hamilton WA, Veronesi JF. Comparison of field techniques used to pressure infuse intravenous fluids. Prehosp Disaster Med. 1991;6(4):429-434.
Books—Schwartz GR, Safar P, Stone JH, et al, eds. Principles and Practice of Emergency Medicine. 2nd ed. Philadelphia, PA, USA: WB Saunders Co.; 1985:1198-1202.
Chapters—Lindberg R. Pathology of head injuries. In: Cowley RA, Trump BF, eds, Pathophysiology of Shock. Baltimore, MD, USA: Williams and Wilkins; 1982:588-592.
Presentations at meetings (published)—Jones M. Lessons learned during the Haiti earthquake. Paper presented at: 17th Annual Meeting of the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Management; May 31-June 3, 2011; Beijing, China.
Presentations at meetings (unpublished)—Jones M. Lessons learned during the Haiti earthquake. Paper presented at: 17th Annual Meeting of the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Management; May 31-June 3, 2011; Beijing, China.
Web sites—The importance of behavior in cancer prevention and early detection. American Cancer Society Web site. http://www.cancer.org/Research/ResearchProgramsFun... BehaviorinCancerPreventionandEarlyDetection/the-importance-of-behavior-in-cancer-prevention-and-early-detection. Accessed January 1, 2012.
Online government or organization reports—World Health Organization. World Health Statistics 2011. http://www.who.int/gho/publications/world_health_statistics/EN_WHS2011_Full.pdf. Published 2011. Accessed February 6, 2012.
ORCID
We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.
If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Licence to publish
Before Cambridge can publish your manuscript, we need a signed licence to publish agreement. Under the agreement, certain rights are granted to the journal owner which allow publication of the article. The original ownership of the copyright in the article remains unchanged. For full details see the publishing agreement page.
Manuscript Review Process
Manuscripts submitted are first reviewed by Editorial Staff for proper format and possible plagiarism. Section Editors and the Editor-in-Chief may return manuscripts that are written on topics that are not within the scope of PDM. Manuscripts with political bias or that are critical in an unfounded manner are returned to the Author.
Expert review of manuscripts is one of the means of selecting manuscripts for publication in PDM. Manuscripts are also selected for timeliness of the research topic, quality of study design, validity of scientific methods, and uniqueness of the research. Manuscripts that are submitted without adherence to the proper format and style described in the PDM "Instructions for Contributors" cannot be selected for publication (available on the PDM website and at the time of manuscript submission).
PDM adheres to the international publishing standards of the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Peer review is the objective assessment of manuscripts submitted to journals by experts without connection to the research under review or preparation of the manuscript. Peer review of manuscripts submitted to PDM is done in a blinded manner in which the reviewers and authors are unknown to each other. Reviewers who may have a conflict of interest with review of a manuscript must withdraw from the review. Including other factors, blinded reviews are used by PDM Editors to determine the priority for publishing each manuscript in the Journal. Because PDM receives more submissions than there are pages available for publication of manuscripts received, only a fraction of manuscripts submitted to the Journal can be selected for publication.
The PDM peer review process occurs in two stages. The first stage includes review by a Format Reviewer that is based on the publishing requirements provided in the Author Checklist that Authors must attest to having reviewed at the time of submission of a manuscript. The first stage also includes a Methods Review that is specific to study design and methods. If a manuscript is acceptable following Format and Methods Reviews, it is submitted for final review to at least one (usually two or more) content reviewers who are experts in the field of the research topic.