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Author Guidelines

Instructions to Authors
Revised January, 2010 ______________________________________________________________________

About the Journal

Journal of Medical Laboratory Science (JMLS) is a monthly peer-reviewed international journal indexed with PubMed/MEDLINE, Excerpta Medica/EMBASE, Index Copernicus, and SCOPUS. The journals full text is available online at www.jmedlab.org . The journals website (www.jmedlab.org ) gets over 500 unique visitors every day. The journal allows free access (Open Access) to its contents and permits authors to self-archive final accepted version of the articles on any compliant institutional / subject-based repository. The journal does not charge for submission.
Scope of the Journal

The journal will cover technical, clinical and biomedical studies related to human well being including ethical and social issues. The journal caters to the need to practicing clinicians. Hence, articles with clinical interest and implications will be given preference. Traditionally, articles from social science, epidemiology, psychology, and traditional medicine have found place in the journal.
The Editorial Process

A manuscript will be reviewed for possible publication with the understanding that it is being submitted to JMLS alone at that point in time and has not been published anywhere, simultaneously submitted, or already accepted for publication elsewhere. The journal expects that authors would authorize one of them to correspond with the Journal for all matters related to the manuscript. All manuscripts received are duly acknowledged. On submission, editors review all submitted manuscripts initially for suitability for formal review. Manuscripts that are found suitable for publication in JMLS are sent to two or more expert reviewers. During submission, the contributor is requested to provide names of two or three qualified reviewers who have had experience in the subject of the submitted manuscript, but this is not mandatory. The reviewers should not be affiliated with the same institutes as the contributor/s. However, the selection of these reviewers is at the sole discretion of the editor. The journal follows a double-blind review process, wherein the reviewers and authors are unaware of each others identity. Every manuscript is also assigned to a member of the editorial team, who based on the comments from the reviewers takes a final decision on the manuscript. The comments and suggestions (acceptance/ rejection/ amendments in manuscript) received from reviewers are conveyed to the corresponding author. If required, the author is requested to provide a point by point response to reviewer’s comments and submit a revised version of the manuscript. This process is repeated till reviewers and editors are satisfied with the manuscript.
Manuscripts accepted for publication are copy edited for grammar, punctuation, print style, and format. Page proofs are sent to the corresponding author. The corresponding author is expected to return the corrected proofs within three days. It may not be possible to incorporate corrections received after that period. The whole process of submission of the manuscript to final decision and sending and receiving proofs is completed online. To achieve faster and greater dissemination of knowledge and information, the journal publishes articles online as Ahead of Print immediately on acceptance.

Contribution Details

Contributors should provide a description of contributions made by each of them towards the manuscript. Description should be divided in following categories, as applicable: concept, design, definition of intellectual content, literature search, clinical studies, experimental studies, data acquisition, data analysis, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, manuscript editing and manuscript review. Authors' contributions will be printed along with the article. One or more author should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole from inception to published article and should be designated as 'guarantor'.

Conflict of Interest competing Interest

All authors of must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with publication of the manuscript or an institution or product that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or is important to the outcome of the study presented. Authors should also disclose conflict of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

Online Submission of the Manuscripts

Articles should be submitted online from www.jmedlab.org new authors will have to register as author, which is a simple two step procedure. For online submission articles should be prepared in two files (first page file and article file). Images should be submitted separately.

First Page File: Prepare the title page, covering letter, acknowledgement, etc. using a word processor program. All information which can reveal your identity should be here. Use text/rtf/doc/pdf files. Do not zip the files.
Article file: The main text of the article, beginning from Abstract till References (including tables) should be in this file. Do not include any information (such as acknowledgement, your names in page headers, etc.) in this file. Use text/rtf/doc/pdf files. Do not zip the files. Limit the file size to 400 kb. Do not incorporate images in the file. If file size is large, graphs can be submitted as images separately without incorporating them in the article file to reduce the size of the file.
Images: Submit good quality color images. Each image should be less than 400 kb in size. Size of the image can be reduced by decreasing the actual height and width of the images (keep up to 1024x760 pixels or 5 inches). All image formats (jpeg, tiff, gif, bmp, png, eps, etc.) are acceptable; jpeg is most suitable. Do not zip the files.
Legends: Legends for the figures/images should be included at the end of the article file.

If the manuscript is submitted online, the contributors' form and copyright transfer form has to be submitted in original with the signatures of all the contributors within two weeks from submission. Hard copies of the images (one set), for articles submitted online, should be sent to the journal office at the time of submission of a revised manuscript.

Preparation of the Manuscript

The text of observational and experimental articles should be divided into sections with the headings: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, References, Tables, Figures, Figure legends, and Acknowledgment. Do not make subheadings in these sections. Send laser printout, on white thick paper, of A4 size (212 × 297 mm), with margins of 25 mm (1 inch) from all the four sides. Type or print on only one side of the paper. Use double spacing throughout. Number pages consecutively, beginning with the title page. The language should be British English.

Title Page
The title page should carry

Type of manuscript (e.g. Original article, Case Report)
The title of the article, which should be concise, but informative;
Running title or short title not more than 50 characters;
The name by which each contributor is known (Last name, First name and initials of middle name), with his or her highest academic degree(s) and institutional affiliation;
The name of the department(s) and institution(s) to which the work should be attributed;
The name, address, phone numbers, facsimile numbers and e-mail address of the contributor responsible for correspondence about the manuscript;
The total number of pages, total number of photographs and word counts separately for abstract and for the text (excluding the references and abstract);
Source(s) of support in the form of grants, equipment, drugs, or all of these;
Acknowledgement, if any; and
If the manuscript was presented as part at a meeting, the organization, place, and exact date on which it was read.

Abstract Page
The second page should carry the full title of the manuscript and an abstract (of no more than 150 words for case reports, brief reports and 250 words for original articles). The abstract should be structured and state the Context (Background), Aims, Settings and Design, Methods and Material, Statistical analysis used, Results and Conclusions. Below the abstract should provide 3 to 10 key word.

Introduction
State the purpose of the article and summaries the rationale for the study or observation.

Methods
The Methods section should include only information that was available at the time the plan or protocol for the study was written; all information obtained during the conduct of the study belongs in the Results section.

Selection and Description of Participants:
Describe your selection of the observational or experimental participants (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) clearly, including eligibility and exclusion criteria and a description of the source population. Because the relevance of such variables as age and sex to the object of research is not always clear, authors should explain their use when they are included in a study report; for example, authors should explain why only subjects of certain ages were included or why women were excluded. The guiding principle should be clarity about how and why a study was done in a particular way. When authors use variables such as race or ethnicity, they should define how they measured the variables and justify their relevance.

Technical information:
Identify the methods, apparatus (give the manufacturer's name and address in parentheses), and procedures in sufficient detail to allow other workers to reproduce the results. Give references to established methods, including statistical methods (see below); provide references and brief descriptions for methods that have been published but are not well known; describe new or substantially modified methods, give reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations. Identify precisely all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration.

Authors submitting review manuscripts should include a section describing the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting, and synthesizing data. These methods should also be summarized in the abstract.
Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol, assignment of interventions (methods of randomization, concealment of allocation to treatment groups), and the method of masking (blinding), based on the CONSORT Statement (Moher D, Schulz KF, Altman DG: The CONSORT Statement: Revised Recommendations for Improving the Quality of Reports of Parallel-Group Randomised Trials. Ann Intern Med. 2001;134:657-662, also available at http://www.consort-statement.org).

Authors submitting review article should include a section describing the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting, and synthesising data. These methods should also be summarised in the abstract.

Ethics
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 (institutional or regional) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (available at http://www.wma.net/e/policy/17-c_e.html). Do not use patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. When reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether the institution's or a national research council's guide for, or any national law on the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

Statistics
When possible, quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). Report losses to observation (such as dropouts from a clinical trial). Put a general description of methods in the Methods section. When data are summarised in the Results section, specify the statistical methods used to analyse them. Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as 'random' (which implies a randomising device), 'normal', 'significant', 'correlations', and 'sample'. Define statistical terms, abbreviations, and most symbols. Use upper italics (P 0.048). For all P values include the exact value and not less than 0.05 or 0.001.

Results
Present your results in logical sequence in the text, tables, and illustrations, giving the main or most important findings first. Do not repeat in the text all the data in the tables or illustrations; emphasize or summarize only important observations. Extra or supplementary materials and technical detail can be placed in an appendix where it will be accessible but will not interrupt the flow of the text; alternatively, it can be published only in the electronic version of the journal.

When data are summarized in the Results section, give numeric results not only as derivatives (for example, percentages) but also as the absolute numbers from which the derivatives were calculated, and specify the statistical methods used to analyze them. Restrict tables and figures to those needed to explain the argument of the paper and to assess its support. Use graphs as an alternative to tables with many entries; do not duplicate data in graphs and tables. Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as "random" (which implies a randomizing device), "normal," "significant," "correlations," and "sample."
Where scientifically appropriate, analyses of the data by variables such as age and sex should be included.

Discussion
Include Summary of key findings (primary outcome measures, secondary outcome measures, results as they relate to a prior hypothesis); Strengths and limitations of the study (study question, study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation); Interpretation and implications in the context of the totality of evidence (is there a systematic review to refer to, if not, could one be reasonably done here and now?, what this study adds to the available evidence, effects on patient care and health policy, possible mechanisms); Controversies raised by this study; and Future research directions (for this particular research collaboration, underlying mechanisms, clinical research). Do not repeat in detail data or other material given in the Introduction or the Results section.

In particular, contributors should avoid making statements on economic benefits and costs unless their manuscript includes economic data and analyses. Avoid claiming priority and alluding to work that has not been completed.

Acknowledgments
As an appendix to the text, one or more statements should specify 1) contributions that need acknowledging but do not justify authorship, such as general support by a departmental chair; 2) acknowledgments of technical help; and 3) acknowledgments of financial and material support, which should specify the nature of the support. This should be included in the title page of the manuscript.

References
References should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text (not in alphabetic order). Identify references in text, tables, and legends by Arabic numerals in square bracket (e.g. [10]). References cited only in tables or figure legends should be numbered in accordance with the sequence established by the first identification in the text of the particular table or figure. Use the style of the examples below, which are based on the formats used by the NLM in Index Medicus. The titles of journals should be abbreviated according to the style used in Index Medicus. Use complete name of the journal for non-indexed journals. Avoid using abstracts as references. Information from manuscripts submitted but not accepted should be cited in the text as "unpublished observations" with written permission from the source. Avoid citing a "personal communication" unless it provides essential information not available from a public source, in which case the name of the person and date of communication should be cited in parentheses in the text. For scientific articles, contributors should obtain written permission and confirmation of accuracy from the source of a personal communication.

Articles in Journals

Standard journal article:

Kulkarni SB, Chitre RG, Satoskar RS. Serum proteins in tuberculosis. J Postgrad Med 1960;6:113-20.

List the first six contributors followed by et al.

Volume with supplement: Shen HM, Zhang QF. Risk assessment of nickel carcinogenicity and occupational lung cancer. Environ Health Perspect 1994; 102 Suppl 1:275-82.
Issue with supplement: Payne DK, Sullivan MD, Massie MJ. Women's psychological reactions to breast cancer. Semin Oncol 1996; 23(1, Suppl 2):89-97.
Books and Other Monographs
Personal author(s): Ringsven MK, Bond D. Gerontology and leadership skills for nurses. 2nd ed. Albany (NY): Delmar Publishers; 1996.
Editor(s), compiler(s) as author: Norman IJ, Redfern SJ, editors. Mental health care for elderly people. New York: Churchill Livingstone; 1996.
Chapter in a book: Phillips SJ, Whisnant JP. Hypertension and stroke. In: Laragh JH, Brenner BM, editors. Hypertension: pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management. 2nd ed. New York: Raven Press; 1995. pp. 465-78.

Tables

Tables should be self-explanatory and should not duplicate textual material.
Tables with more than 10 columns and 25 rows are not acceptable.
Type or print out each table with double spacing on a separate sheet of paper. If the table must be continued, repeat the title on a second sheet followed by "(contd.)".
Number tables, in Arabic numerals, consecutively in the order of their first citation in the text and supply a brief title for each.
Place explanatory matter in footnotes, not in the heading.
Explain in footnotes all non-standard abbreviations that are used in each table.
Obtain permission for all fully borrowed, adapted, and modified tables and provide a credit line in the footnote.
For footnotes use the following symbols, in this sequence: *, †, ‡, §, ||, , **, ††, ‡‡

Illustrations (Figures)

Submit three sets of figures.
Send sharp, glossy, un-mounted, colour photographic prints, with height of 4 inches and width of 6 inches.
Figures should be numbered consecutively according to the order in which they have been first cited in the text.
Each figure should have a label pasted (avoid use of liquid gum for pasting) on its back indicating the number of the figure, the running title, top of the figure and the legends of the figure. Do not write the contributor/s' name/s. Do not write on the back of figures, scratch, or mark them by using paper clips.
Labels, numbers, and symbols should be clear and of uniform size. The lettering for figures should be large enough to be legible after reduction to fit the width of a printed column.
Symbols, arrows, or letters used in photomicrographs should contrast with the background and should marked neatly with transfer type or by tissue overlay and not by pen.
Titles and detailed explanations belong in the legends for illustrations not on the illustrations themselves.
When graphs, scatter-grams or histograms are submitted the numerical data on which they are based should also be supplied.
The photographs and figures should be trimmed to remove all the unwanted areas.
If photographs of people are used, either the subjects must not be identifiable or their pictures must be accompanied by written permission to use the photograph.
If a figure has been published, acknowledge the original source and submit written permission from the copyright holder to reproduce the material. A credit line should appear in the legend for figures for such figures.
Print outs of digital photographs are not acceptable. For digital images send TIFF files of minimum 1200 x 1600 pixel size.
The Journal reserves the right to crop, rotate, reduce, or enlarge the photographs to an acceptable size.

Legends for Illustrations

Type or print out legends (maximum 40 words, excluding the credit line) for illustrations using double spacing, with Arabic numerals corresponding to the illustrations.
When symbols, arrows, numbers, or letters are used to identify parts of the illustrations, identify and explain each one in the legend.
Explain the internal scale and identify the method of staining in photomicrographs.

Checklist

Covering letter:

1- Signed by all contributors

2- Previous publication / presentations mentioned

3- Source of funding mentioned

4- Conflicts of interest disclosed

Authors

1- Last name and given name provided along with Middle name initials (where
applicable)

2- Author for correspondence, with e-mail address provided

3- Number of contributors restricted as per the instructions

4- Identity not revealed in paper except title page (e.g. name of the institute in
5- Methods, citing previous study as 'our study', names on figure labels, name of institute in photographs, etc.)

Presentation and format

1- Double spacing

2- Margins 2.5 cm from all four sides

3- Page numbers included at bottom

4- Title page contains all the desired information

5- Running title provided (not more than 50 characters)

6- Abstract page contains the full title of the manuscript

7- Abstract provided (structured abstract of 250 words for original articles,
unstructured abstracts of about 150 words for all other manuscripts excluding letters to the Editor)

8- Key words provided (three or more)

9- Introduction of 75-100 words

10- Headings in title case (not ALL CAPITALS) References according to the journal's instructions, punctuation marks checked

11- Send the article file without Track Changes

Language and grammar

Uniformly American English

Write the full term for each abbreviation at its first use in the title, abstract, keywords and text separately unless it is a standard unit of measure. Numerals from 1 to 10 spelt out

Numerals at the beginning of the sentence spelt out

Check the manuscript for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors

If a brand name is cited, supply the manufacturer's name and address (city and state/country).

Tables and figures

1- No repetition of data in tables and graphs and in text

2- Actual numbers from which graphs drawn, provided

3-Figures necessary and of good quality (colour)

4- Table and figure numbers in Arabic letters (not Roman)

5- Labels pasted on back of the photographs (no names written)

6- Figure legends provided (not more than 40 words)

7- Patients' privacy maintained (if not permission taken)

8- Credit note for borrowed figures/tables provided

9-Write the full term for each abbreviation used in the table as a footnote

Contributors' form

(To be modified as applicable and one singed copy attached with the manuscript)
Manuscript Title:
________________________________________________________________________

Manuscript number: (For articles submitted online)
I/we certify that I/we have participated sufficiently in contributing to the intellectual content, concept and design of this work or the analysis and interpretation of the data (when applicable), as well as writing of the manuscript, to take public responsibility for it and have agreed to have my/our name listed as a contributor.
I/we believe copyright;
the right to grant permission to republish the article in whole or in part, with or without fee;
the right to produce preprints or reprints and translate into languages other than English for sale or free distribution; and
the right to republish the work in a collection of articles in any other mechanical or electronic format.
We give the rights to the corresponding author to make necessary changes as per the request of the journal, do the rest of the correspondence on our behalf and he/she will act as the guarantor for the manuscript on our behalf.
All persons who have made substantial contributions to the work reported in the manuscript, but who are not contributors, are named in the Acknowledgment and have given me/us their written permission to be named. If I/we do not include an Acknowledgment that means I/we have not received substantial contributions from non-contributors and no contributor has been omitted.

Name Signature Date signed
1 --------------- --------------- ---------------
2 --------------- --------------- ---------------
3 --------------- --------------- ---------------
4 --------------- --------------- --------------- (up to 4 contributors for case report/ images/ review)
5 --------------- --------------- ---------------
6 --------------- --------------- --------------- (up to 6 contributors for original studies)

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.

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).
The submission file is in Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Journal of Medical Laboratory Science

مجلة علمية دولية ربع سنوية محكمة

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