gms | German Medical Science

GMS German Medical Science — an Interdisciplinary Journal

Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany (AWMF)

ISSN 1612-3174

Information for authors

Authors’ Guidelines

1. General Information
GMS German Medical Science – an Interdisciplinary Journal is an open access e-journal, which publishes articles primarily in English on an interdisciplinary level for the entire range of the medical sciences and the public health politics. All articles go through a peer review process before publication. The authors’ guidelines follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.
GMS German Medical Science does not charge authors with article processing charges (APCs) or submission charges.
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 or she holds the copyrights on the 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 publication in GMS German Medical Science – an Interdisciplinary Journal. In cases of publication, the author grants GMS German Medical Science – an Interdisciplinary Journal the right to store the work 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 make reference to the original publication (originally published in e.g.: GMS Ger Med Sci. 2005;3:Doc...).
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 or she agrees with the publication in the present form. The existence of such a consent is to be confirmed by the author in writing.
2.4 Informed Consent
All manuscripts on clinical research performed in humans or with materials obtained from humans must include a section declaring that the research project has been approved by an institutional review board or ethics committee and that patients or probands have granted informed consent prior to inclusion.
2.5 Ethical Treatment of Animals
All manuscripts on animal research must report procedures by which ethical treatment of animals has been guaranteed.
3 Manuscript Preparation
3.1 In General
The manuscripts are to be submitted in English, and a German abstract and German title translation should be included. A bilingual publication (English/German) of the full text is also possible. Only in justified exceptional cases (e.g. with articles, whose special contents do not permit an adequate interpretation in English language), a publication only in German language could be considered. Here an English title translation and an extended English abstract are necessary as well. The manuscripts may include tables, diagrams and pictures, as well as sound or video sequences.
3.1.1 Title Page
On the first page of the manuscript the English and German title of the article is stated, followed by the surnames and first names of all authors, their email addresses and the facilities where they are active. Then give separately the name, mail and email address of the author conducting the correspondence.
3.1.2 Abstract and Key Words
All original contributions, case descriptions and review articles are to be preceded by an English and a German abstract. The summary is to be drawn up in such a way that it represents a condensed extract of the work. All abstracts should be submitted in outline format, using the bolded headings of Objective, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. The author should indicate adequate keywords which, as far as possible, are taken from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). 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. Further structural recommendations are given with the individual article types.
3.1.3 Literature References
The literature cited in the text must be listed at the end of the article according to the Vancouver Style of References also used in Medline. References should be numbered in the order in which they are listed in the reference list. The reference list may be sorted in the order in which references are first mentioned in the text or, alternatively, in alphabetical order by first authors' names. In both cases, references in the reference list should be preceded by consecutive numbers. 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, conclusion.
Case reports
represent a case relevant for the scientific interest. They are to be subdivided into: Abstract, introduction, case description, discussion, conclusion.
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. Book and software reviews refer to important monographs and electronic programs from the area of medicine.
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.
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 in the text as described in 3.1.3 and 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. 3.1.2). 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 Text Formats
Each author has the possibility to submit new papers into the Manuscript Operating System (MOPS) of GMS. Acceptable text formats 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. The graphics should be integrated in the text, if possible, and additionally be provided as separate files with clear file names. The upload of your files takes place in the Manuscript Operating System (MOPS).
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.
For general questions concerning the manuscript submission, please contact the GMS Editorial Office.