gms | German Medical Science

GMS Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e.V. (GMDS)

ISSN 1860-9171

Information for authors

Authors' Guidelines for GMS Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology

1 GMS Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (MIBE)
GMS Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (MIBE) is an official scientific journal of German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e.V. , GMDS) and the “Life Science Informatics”(„Informatik in den Lebenswissenschaften“) section of German Society for Informatics (Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI).
MIBE publishes research articles about collecting, analyzing and providing data about health and diseases and about designing processes in medical research and patient care. MIBE aims to support the Healthy and the Sick as well as medical professionals and scientists in preventing, healing and easing diseases and to better understand their causes and impact.
Besides research articles MIBE publishes especially case reports, review articles, rapid publications, short communications, and letters to the editor. MIBE’s focus is on research undertaken by and together with members of GMDS and GI but also on topics of special interest for those members.
MIBE supports the goals of GMDS and feels bound to its ethical guidelines.
MIBE is an open access e-journal. Publication is free of charge for members of GMDS and the “Life Science Informatics” section of GI. But at the moment there are no charges for any author.
After a peer review procedure the editors together with the editorial board decide whether an article is accepted or not. Publication language is English. German articles with English abstract are possible as well.
This authors’ guideline principally follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.
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 conference is not regarded as a publication.
3 Authorship and Copyright
All authors assure 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 that she/he holds the copyrights on his works as well as on the text and illustrations attached therein in the Author's Contract. 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 being in agreement with a publication in MIBE. In cases of publication, the author grants MIBE 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 (e.g. “originally published in: GMS Med Inform Biom Epidemiol. 2011;1:...”)..
4 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 on a separate form. This notification is handled confidentially and only when the manuscript is accepted for publication does the editorial staff discuss with the author in which form this information will be relayed. If there are no conflicts of interests, the following sentence should be used: "The authors declare that they have no competing interests."
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]'.
5 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 consent is to be confirmed by the author in writing.
6 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.
7 Ethical Treatment of Animals
All manuscripts on animal research must report procedures by which ethical treatment of animals has been guaranteed.
8 Manuscript Preparation
8.1 In General
Manuscripts should preferably be submitted in English, and in that case need to include a German abstract and a German title translation. The submission of German manuscripts is possible, including an English abstract and an English title translation. A bilingual publication (English/German) of the full text is also possible.
The manuscripts may include tables, diagrams and pictures, as well as sound or video sequences.
8.2 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 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.
8.3 Abstract and Keywords
All research articles, case reports and review articles are to be preceded by a German and an English abstract. The summary is to be drawn up in such a way that it represents a condensed extract of the work. 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 tips are with the individual article types.
8.4 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/Website:
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.
9 Article Types
Research articles
deal with current problems of general interest, with adequate methodology. It should be evident from the papers that they make a substantial contribution in clarifying the formulated problem. Generally they are to be subdivided into: Abstract, introduction (incl. research question), methods, results, discussion, conclusions (incl. answers to the research question). In case of empirical work the relevant guidelines for reporting standards have to be observed. This holds especially for the CONSORT Statement for controlled clinical trials and the PRISMA statement for systematic reviews.
Case reports
report on an innovative and relevant project in Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology, and Life Science Informatics. Generally they are to be subdivided into: Abstract, introduction, case description, discussion, conclusions. Relevance of project and results for the scientific community has to be explained clearly.
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. Systematic reviews will be considered as research articles.
Rapid publications/short communications and letters to the editor
contain comments to previous MIBE-publications or announcements 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.
GMDS statements
reflect the professional position of a GMDS body on a question in Medical Informatics, Biometry, Epidemiology, Medical Documentation and Life Science Informatics. GMDS statements are scientific papers and should generally be structured like original papers. Since GMDS statements are results of a consensus process, they are subject to a special review process for publication in MIBE, in which the executive board of the GMDS is also involved. When submitting manuscripts of this type, the consensus process inside GMDS shall be described.
Retrospective and prospective views
are articles like inaugural and farewell lectures or articles on historical developments.

Announcements about awards, statements and announcements of the GMDS, scientific prizes and personalities etc. are published by the GMDS office using different media.

10 Technical Requirements
10.1 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 have to be as mentioned before. 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. 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. References on statistics: Graph pad software offers numerous freely available online computers for statistic calculations.
10.2 Text Formats
Articles should be submitted as Word documents.
10.3 Graphic Formats
In general the lossless graphic-format PNG shall be used. JPG shall only be uses for photos formatted this way from source; JPG formats shall not be changed to PNG. Even if the graphics are integrated in the text, they should be provided additionally as separate files with clear file names.
10.4 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". By co-operation with the Dryad repository, German Medical Science offers an easy way to achieve that. Dryad (http://datadryad.org/) is a repository for research data from life sciences being developed at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the University of North Carolina Metadata Research Center, in coordination with a large group of Journals and Societies.
Benefits of publishing research data / primary data include:
For authors:
  • Citeability: via persistent identifiers (DOI)
  • Long-term archiving
  • Independent quality assurance through peer review
  • Legal security: Like the article, data are published under a Creative commons licence. Dryad is using the Creative Commons Zero.
For the scientific community:
  • 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
Please submit a descriptive caption together with your data. Use of platform-independent file formats is required, such as:
  • For additional documentation (e.g. detailed case reports): PDF
  • For image data: PNG, JPG, GIF, TIFF
  • For audio-visual material: MPG
  • For text or tabular data: TXT, CSV
If you have further questions about the data submission, please send an e-mail to help@datadryad.org.
11 Submitting a Manuscript
Manuscripts together with graphic files are to be submitted using the manuscript operating system (MOPS) of GMS.
The receipt of a manuscript will be confirmed. Before the paper goes to press the authors will get a proof where only typing errors could be corrected.
For technical questions concerning the manuscript submission, please address the GMS editorial office.
12 VG WORT
As an author, you can report your publication in GMS Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (MIBE) to “Verwertungsgesellschaft WORT” (VG WORT) so that the publication will be correctly included in the annual dividends. You need to register at www.vgwort.de to do this. You can use your VG WORT account to request so-called counting marks (Zählmarken) and send them to the GMS editorial office. Please note that the counter will only be included in the html version of the publication. When you request the counter, please make sure to include the DOI or the link to the html version, not the DOI or the link to the PDF version of the article. Whether and in what amount you are entitled to dividends, as well as any further questions you may have about VG WORT, will be answered by VG WORT itself.