gms | German Medical Science

GMS Hygiene and Infection Control

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Krankenhaushygiene (DGKH)

ISSN 2196-5226

Information for authors

Authors’ Guidelines

1. General Information
GMS Hygiene and Infection Control is an interdisciplinary e-journal with open access throughout the world, that publishes in English and German papers for the entire range of hospital hygiene related to actual special topics. The Journal guarantees a quality assurance process with extensive and stringent peer reviews.  All submitted manuscripts are subject to an extensive and quick peer review process. The authors' guidelines principally follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.
GMS Hygiene and Infection Control does not charge any article processing charges (APCs) nor submission charges to its authors.
2. Publication Requirements
The submitted manuscripts or substantial parts of them should not have been previously published or submitted for publication somewhere else. The abbreviated version of the contents for presentation at a meeting is not regarded as a publication.
2.1 Authorship and Copyright
All authors insure that they have furnished a substantial contribution to the article and that they are in agreement with form and contents of the manuscript. The author conducting the negotiations confirms in the Author’s Contract that he holds the rights on his works as well as on the text and illustrations attached therein. If material (e.g. illustrations or tables) is used from other sources, the author must submit a written statement from the holder of the copyrights indicating agreement with a publication in GMS Hygiene and Infection Control. In cases of publication, the author grants GMS Hygiene and Infection Control the right to store in databases for an unlimited period of time, as well as to distribute and to reproduce the article in electronic form. All remaining usage rights of the author are not restricted, however, all further publications should display original publication note (originally published in: GMS Hyg Infect Control with complete citation.
2.2 Conflict of Interests, Funding
Financial or other support of institutes or companies, as well as promotion funds, is to be stated in the acknowledgments or conflict of interests section. All financial or other connections, which the author has to a company, whose products or competition products play an important role in represented facts of the matter, should be described and enclosed in the cover letter. This notification is handled confidentially and only when the manuscript is accepted for publication it will be published together with the manuscript after due consultation with the author.
An important aspect of scientific publication is the indication of funding support. You must ensure that the full, correct details of your funder(s) and any relevant grant numbers are included. A funding statement may be worded as follows: 'This work was supported by [name of funder] grant number [xxx]'.
2.3 Protection of Patients' Rights to Privacy
When using records of patients it must be guaranteed that the person is not identifiable on the basis of the portrayal. Otherwise, the author must seek explicit consent from the person concerned (or their representative) that he agrees to the publication in the present form. The existence of such a consent is to be confirmed by the author in writing.
2.4 Human Rights and Informed Consent
All manuscripts concerning clinical investigations with humans or human materials must include a statement that the project was approved by the local Ethical Committee and that all patients or test persons gave written consent before participation after adequate explanation.
2.5 Ethical Handling with Animals
All manuscripts must clearly explain test procedures performed with animals giving no cause for ethical complaints.
3 Manuscript Preparation
3.1 In General
The manuscripts are to be submitted in English. Abstract, title and keywords should be included in German and English. Non-German authors of accepted manuscripts may contact one of the editors for help with the German translation of their abstracts and titles. Authors may also submit German manuscripts with the understanding that once accepted the manuscripts have to be translated by the authors themselves or at the authors' cost. The manuscripts may include tables, diagrams and pictures, as well as sound or video.
3.1.1 Covering letter
Every manuscript must be submitted with a cover letter, where all authors indicate possible overlaps with already published articles or elsewhere submitted manuscripts. The submitting author declares that all coauthors gave written consent to the accomplished manuscript. Finally any possible conflicts of interests must be obviously indicated.
3.1.2 Title Page
On the first page of the manuscript the English and German title of the article are stated, followed by the surnames and first names of all authors, their e-mail addresses and the facilities where they are active. Then give separately the name, mail and e-mail address of the author conducting the correspondence.
3.1.3 Abstract and Key Words
The summary is to be drawn up in such a way that it represents a condensed extract of the work. It should be subdivided with the headings in bold: aim, methods, results and conclusion.
The author should indicate adequate keywords which, as far as possible, are taken from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH, see MeSH-Database or MeSH-Browser). With original papers and case descriptions you should also indicate the trade names and names of the producer of the drugs applied and medical devices, as well as the chemical substances and their CAS number in order to make this information indexable in appropriate databases.
3.1.4 Literature References
The literature cited in the text is listed at the end of the article according to the Vancouver Style of References also used in Medline (see National Library of Medicine). References should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are mentioned in the reference list. The reference list should be sorted in order of the references in the text or of the surnames of the first authors alphabetically.  Identify references in text, tables, and legends by Arabic numerals in square brackets. Please do not use footnotes!
Some Examples:
Standard journal article:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347(4):284-7.
Monograph:
Murray PR, Rosenthal KS, Kobayashi GS, Pfaller MA. Medical microbiology. 4th ed. St. Louis: Mosby; 2002.
Chapter/Contribution in a monograph:
Meltzer PS, Kallioniemi A, Trent JM. Chromosome alterations in human solid tumors. In: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, editors. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York: McGraw-Hill; 2002. p. 93-113.
CD-ROM:
Anderson SC, Poulsen KB. Anderson's electronic atlas of hematology [CD-ROM]. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2002.
Journal article on the Internet:
Eysenbach G. SARS and population health technology. J Med Internet Res. 2003;5(2):e14. Available from: http://www.jmir.org/2003/2/e14/
Homepage/Web site:
Cancer-Pain.org [homepage on the Internet]. New York: Association of Cancer Online Resources, Inc.; c2000-01 [updated 2002 May 16; cited 2002 Jul 9]. Available from: http://www.cancer-pain.org/
Further detailed sample references
under http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html.
3.2 Article Types
Research articles
deal with current problems, with adequate empirical or experimental methodology. It should be evident from the papers that they make a substantial contribution in clarifying the formulated problem. They are to be subdivided into: Abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusions.
Case reports
represent a case relevant for the scientific interest. They are to be subdivided into: Abstract, introduction, case description, discussion, conclusions.
Review articles
are to show the state of research in detail, summarize and clarify open research questions. Review articles should include abstract and introduction, furthermore, they may be subdivided sectionwise according to the requirements of the topic.
Rapid publications/short communications and letters to the editor
contain comments or announcements and communications with news character and are principally welcome as a central element in the discussion of research results. They go through a peer review like the other articles.
In comparison, rapid responses are commentaries that cannot be cited, are limited in length and linked directly to an article to make discussions possible. The editorial staff reserves the right at any time to select, as well as to abridge and revise them. This feature will be implemented shortly.
Announcements
about awards, scientific prizes, personalities, consensus papers and other official statements should be submitted by the respective expert association.
3.3 Technical Requirements
3.3.1 Typography and Technical Terms
Do not use block style or hyphenation when drawing up your manuscripts. Line breaks are only to be inserted in paragraphs. Literature references are to be numbered consecutively in the text (3.1.4) and listed at the end of the document as text, under no circumstances by means of the automatic footnote function. All illustrations and tables are to be provided with legends and numbered consecutively.
The publication system of GMS does not allow for annotations in the form of footnotes or endnotes. Textual explications must be integrated in the plain text (e.g. in brackets, italic).
The basic units of the International System for Measures and Weights (SI) and the units derived from them are to be used for all units of measurement. For the indication of blood pressure values the unit "mmHg" is permissible, for the indication of temperatures the unit °C. When using other units in illustrations and tables the conversion factors are to be indicated in the legend.
The nomenclature of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) resp. the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB) is to be used for the designation of chemical substances. The additional indication of the register number of the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is recommended.
Generally, the generic name is to be used when mentioning drugs. If certain commercial products were used in the research, then these trade names and the names of the producer should be quoted in the method part. In addition, this data will be indexable via the recording in special data fields (s. 3.1.3). The spelling in the "Red List" applies. Abbreviations without solutions should be only used, if they are generally common (DNA, WHO). All remaining abbreviations are to be identified when first used. If necessary, an abbreviation list should be added.
3.3.2 Submission
If you would like to submit a manuscript, please contact the editor-in-chief or a member of the editorial board (see Editorial Board). After contacting us, you will be able to submit your manuscript.  Accepted data formats for submission are MS-Word (*.doc) and Rich Text Format (*.rtf).
3.3.3 Graphic Formats
The following graphic formats may be used: the formats TIFF and BMP (loss-free bitmap-formats); GIF and PNG (bitmap-formats compressed) for charts, JPG (compressable bitmap-format) for photos. Even if the graphics are integrated in the text, they should be provided additionally as separate files with clear file names. 
3.3.4 Research Data / Primary Data (Supplementary Material)
We expect our authors to submit relevant underlying data in addition to the manuscripts for peer review and publication. This complies with demands of funding organizations like Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and European Research Council in terms of “Good scientific practice”.
Benefits of publishing research data / primary data include:
  • Citeability: recognition as an independent scientific achievement
  • Subsequent use: enables further interpretation of data, utilization for follow-up research projects, creation of interconnections between data sets, data/text mining
  • Transparency: through traceability and reproducibility (if applicable) of research results
  • Efficiency: through limitation of work and financial expenses
By co-operation with the Dryad repository, German Medical Science offers an easy way for publishing research data and achieving:
  • Cross-reference between article and underlying data via persistent identifiers (DOI)
  • Long-term archiving
  • Independent quality assurance through peer review and data curation
  • Legal security: Like the article, data are published under a Creative commons licence. Dryad is using the Creative Commons Zero.
ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences currently takes over the costs for data publications related to GMS articles.
Please submit a README file along with your data and use platform-independent file formats, such as CSV for tabular data. Please consider the FAIR Data Principles and best practice on this.
Further information about Dryad and the publication process is given at datadryad.org/stash/submission_process and in the FAQ. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to send an e-mail to help@datadryad.org.
ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences also offers data publication in PUBLISSO – Repository for Life Sciences. If you prefer a repository hosted in Germany or another license than Creative Commons Zero or the data is in German, the Repository for Life Sciences is an alternative to Dryad. You find further information at https://www.publisso.de/en/research-data-management/rd-publishing/. For questions, please contact gms@zbmed.de.
4. Process of reviewing
GMS Hygiene and Infection Control confirms the submission of every manuscript. Each manuscript is subjected to a peer review process conducted by knowledgeable experts in the field serving as referees. The referees assess the originality and scientific quality of the presented data. At least two independent reviewers will carry out the evaluation separately for every manuscript. The experts remain anonymous towards the author, but also towards each other. Based on their assessment the editorial board finally decides the acceptance or rejection of the manuscript. This decision will be transmitted to the authors as soon as possible.