Professional Development


37 - Parts of a manuscript
The ICMJE establishes a basic structure in its Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts to be submitted to biomedical journals, which includes:A title page with the title of the article, the authors' names and institutional affiliations, the corresponding author and author for reprint requests, source of support, a running title, word count and the number of figures and tables.An abstract or summary. Each journal has its specific requirements for length and structure.Different sections named Introduction, Methods (or Material and Methods or Patients and Methods depending on the journal), Results and Discussion. A brief Acknowledgments section can be added here instead of on the Title Page.After that, the References section must be included in a single section. Each journal has its own Reference format, although the Vancouver style is often used.Finally, Tables must be included, one per page, and each with its heading and footnotes. The Figures should be professionally drawn and/or photographed, or submitted as photo-quality digital prints. In addition to requiring a printable version of the figures, some journals now request authors to send electronic files of figures in a format (e.g., JPEG or GIF), which allow for high-quality images in the journal's web version. The authors should review such image files on a computer screen before submitting them, to ensure they meet their own quality standards. One page is used for figure or illustration legends that accompany figures.