Preparation of the article

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PREPARING THE ARTICLE

Title page

This page must contain the following sections.

Article title: Try to include keywords in the title and always include the type of study or publication (e.g., systematic review of the literature, case report, etc.). The title should be presented in Spanish, English, and Portuguese with a maximum of 15 words. Try to include MeSH or DeCS terms in the title.

Specify whether the manuscript is derived from a thesis or whether the results were published in a paper or event. At the foot of the page of the article title.

Metadata: these must be completed in full by the corresponding author and include:

• Full name of each author with their highest academic title
• City, country, affiliation and email address
• ORCID identifier, CvLAC identifier (if applicable), link to Google Scholar and email address of each author.
• The corresponding author must be clearly specified

Structured abstract: no longer than 250 words in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, using the format proposed by the National Library of Medicine: Structured Abstracts. What are Structured Abstracts? [1]. Since the abstract will generally be the section of the article that appears in bibliographic search engines, it must accurately reflect the content of the article. Do not forget to include MeSH and DeCS terms in the title and abstract.

• Introduction.
• Objective: must match the objective or purpose stated in the last paragraph of the introduction.
• Methods: include the most relevant statistical results such as sample size, response rates, p or confidence intervals. Be specific and indicate the values. Include the registration number corresponding to the type of study conducted (if applicable).
• Discution
• Conclusion.
• Registration of the controlled clinical trial, systematic review or umbrella review (if applicable)

Keywords: include between six and ten keywords; at least three of them must be DeCS (Spanish, Portuguese) or MeSH (English) terms. It is useful for the keywords to be included in the title and abstract of the article.

Tables and figures.

Tables: tables and charts shall be referred to as tables and shall be numbered in Arabic numerals in the order in which they appear. The corresponding title shall be at the top of the table and the notes and sources at the bottom. Symbols for units shall appear in the column headers. In research articles, a maximum of 6 tables and figures are allowed, and for systematic reviews, a maximum of 8 tables and figures are allowed.

Footnotes should be cited in superscript, with lowercase letters a-z.

Asterisks* should only be used if the exact p-values cannot be provided. If the table is too long, consider including it as an appendix.

Tables should be submitted in Word format, not as an image.

Figures: Photographs, graphs, drawings, and diagrams are referred to as figures and should be numbered in order of appearance; their titles should be written at the bottom. The colouring technique and magnification used should be indicated in the captions of microphotographs. Photographs should be sent in the body of the article and be sufficiently sharp and contrasted to achieve good reproduction, in .jpeg or .png format; graphs and photographs should have a dpi of 300 and those in which text predominates should have a dpi of 200. Use Arial font for text within the figure, so that it matches the style of the final publication. If a figure or table has been previously published, written permission from the publisher is required if it is not open access, and credit must always be given to the original publication. If photographs of people are used, they must not be identifiable; otherwise, written permission must be obtained to use them. Figures will be included on the page of the document in which they are cited.

Units of measurement.

Measurements should be reported in accordance with the SI (International System of Units).

Abbreviations or acronyms.

Avoid using acronyms or abbreviations in the title or abstract. As far as possible, use only those that are standard. The full word(s) followed by the abbreviation in parentheses should be used only on first mention.

Glossary: if relevant due to the type of terminology used in the article.

Acknowledgements.

This section shall include, where applicable, all persons who contributed to the project but who meet the four criteria mentioned above to be considered authors, as well as any support received from a department or faculty, whether material or financial. This section is optional

Disclosure of conflicts of interest.

Each author must explicitly state whether or not they have any conflicts of interest. If further information on this subject is required, it should be included in the authors' letter of commitment.

Sources of funding.

Provide details, if applicable.

Ethical considerations.

Ensure that all studies conducted on humans or animals comply with international, national, local or institutional laws and requirements on the subject (e.g. the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects [2], the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on the Use of Laboratory Animals, or the European Union (EU) guidelines on the use of animals in scientific research) [3,4] and confirm that the relevant approval has been requested and obtained, as appropriate. Authors must obtain written informed consent for studies involving human subjects and respect their privacy. If applicable, a letter from the Ethics Committee of the institution(s) where the research was conducted and the informed consent form, where applicable, must be attached.

Privacy and confidentiality: patient privacy cannot be disclosed without informed consent. Avoid mentioning patients' names or initials, medical record numbers, or any other information that could identify patients. Masking the eye region in photographs of patients is not considered an adequate form of anonymity protection. Imaging study figures should not contain any information that could identify the patient by name, initials, date of birth, or the institution where the study was conducted.

In some cases, and only with the editor's agreement, prior public disclosure of the data contained in the article may be accepted, for example, to alert the public to health risks.

The Archivos de Medicina journal adheres to the ethical recommendations for scientific publications: Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (5), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) [6] and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) (7).

Authorship and contributions.

An author is considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a study to be published. Authorship has four conditions, which all authors must meet [8]

1. Make a substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work; or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data for the work; and
2. Draft the article or critically revise it for important intellectual content; and
3. Approve the final version to be published; and
4. Agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Seeking funding, collecting data, or providing general supervision, in the case of a group, does not constitute grounds for authorship.

When the research group is large and comes from several institutions, the group must identify the person or persons who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript to the editor and, therefore, will be responsible for completing the forms for the authors and acknowledging conflicts of interest. The group must jointly decide on all matters concerning the authorship of each participant, as it is not the responsibility of the editor to make decisions on this issue or to intervene as an arbitrator if there are conflicts within the group.

Doubts about authorship can be resolved by consulting the taxonomy of roles as a contributor (8).

Before the bibliographical references, the role of each author in the process of creating the article must be declared in accordance with the CRediT taxonomy as follows

• Conceptualisation: ideas; formulation or evolution of the general objectives and goals of the research.
• Data curation: management activities to annotate (produce metadata), cleanse data, and maintain research data (including software code, when necessary to interpret the data itself) for initial use and subsequent reuse.
• Formal analysis: application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise the study data.
• Funding acquisition: obtaining financial support for the project that led to this publication.
• Research: conducting a research process, specifically performing experiments or collecting data/evidence.
• Methodology: developing or designing the methodology; creating models.
• Project management: responsibility for managing and coordinating the planning and execution of the research activity.
• Resources: supplying study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computer resources, or other analysis tools.
• Software: programming, software development; computer program design; implementation of computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
• Supervision: responsibility for supervising and directing the planning and execution of the research activity, including mentoring outside the core team.
• Validation: verification, either as part of the activity or separately, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
• Visualisation: preparation, creation and/or presentation of published work, specifically the visualisation/presentation of data.
• Writing: original draft. Preparation, creation and/or presentation of published work, specifically the writing of the initial draft (including substantive translation).
• Writing: review and editing. Preparation, creation and/or presentation of published work by members of the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision, including pre- or post-publication stages.

Appendices

Multimedia appendices may be PowerPoint or Keynote presentations, audio or podcast files, video files, Excel or Numbers files, SPSS files or questionnaires. They must be uploaded online.

Reviewers

Authors must suggest four external reviewers who have no conflict of interest and are from different institutions. Their full name, affiliation, nationality, email address, academic level (clinical specialisation or master's degree) and profile on Google Scholar or Scopus must be included. This information must be attached to the letter of commitment.

References

1. National Library of Medicine. (2018). Structured Abstracts. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/policy/structured_abstracts.html

2. World Medical Association. World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. JAMA [Internet]. 2013 Nov 27 [cited 2022 Nov 27];310(20):2191–4. Available from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24141714/

3. Animals in NIH Research | grants.nih.gov [Internet]. [cited 2022 Dec 5]. Available from: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/air/index.htm

4. EU regulations on animal research | EARA [Internet]. [cited 2022 Dec 5]. Available from: https://www.eara.eu/animal-research-law

5. COPE. Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing [Internet]. 2014 Jan. Available from: https://publicationethics.org/guidance/guideline/principles-transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing

6. ICJME. ICMJE. 2023 [cited 2024 Feb 9]. ICMJE | Recommendations | Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors. Available from: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html

7. WAME. Recommendations on Publication Ethics Policies for Medical Journals [Internet]. [cited 2024 Feb 9]. Available from: https://wame.org/recommendations-on-publication-ethics-policies-for-medical-journals#Plagiarism

8. National Information Standards Organization. CRediT, Contributor Roles Taxonomy National Information Standards series [Internet]. 2022 Jan [cited 2025 Nov 25]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.3789/ansi.niso.z39.104-2022