Submission of Manuscripts
If you are a new author, you will need to register, and conform to the guidelines set forth in the "Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals," available here. Manuscripts should be written in English and authors are encouraged to utilize the services of editors with experience in English to improve their manuscripts prior to submission.
Author contributions: During the submission process, the submitting author will be asked to specify each author’s individual contributions using CRediT taxonomy. Authors may have multiple types of contributions. This information will be included in the submission confirmation email sent to all authors and, if the manuscript is accepted, will be used to generate the Author Contributions statement for publication.
After an initial screening in the editorial office, each manuscript will be evaluated by the Editor-in-Chief and then assigned to a Handling Editor. The authors will generally be notified within two weeks if the manuscript is not being sent out for review. A decision about manuscripts sent for review will be reached within approximately 6 to 8 weeks and rapidly communicated to the authors. Manuscripts may be accepted for publication (with minor edits), accepted with major revisions, or declined; some manuscripts are declined with an invitation to resubmit. For manuscripts requiring revision or those with an invitation to resubmit, authors will be provided with critiques that must be addressed for the manuscript to be considered further.
Authors are required to provide the names and contact information of at least four (4) suggested reviewers upon submission.
For revised submissions only, please upload two copies of the manuscript, one with track changes ON and the other with track changes OFF.
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.