AUTHOR INSTRUCTIONS

AUTHOR INSTRUCTIONS

SCOPE OF THE JOURNAL

The journal focuses on all topics related to hepatoma, including its occurrence, development, diagnosis and treatment. The coverage also extends to other basic and clinical studies related to surgery, internal medicine, cell biology, pathology, pathophysiology, immunology, genetics, pharmacology and so forth.

Articles in the following areas are especially welcome:

1. Pathogenesis, clinical examination and diagnosis of hepatoma;

2. Surgery, internal medicine, molecular biology, cell biology, pathology, pathophysiology, immunology, genetics, pharmacology, and other research areas related to hepatoma;

3. Treatments of hepatoma, including basic and clinical research on animal models, liver transplantation, molecular targeted therapy, interventional therapy, hepatoma treatment-related drugs, as well as clinical transition of the latest laboratory therapy;

4. Complications of hepatoma, and their preventions and treatments.

PREPARE YOUR MANUSCRIPTS

Types of manuscript

Original Article

Original articles include randomized controlled trials, intervention studies, studies of screening and diagnostic test, outcome studies, cost effectiveness analyses, case-control series, and surveys with high response rate. The text of original articles should amount to about 3,000 words (excluding abstract, references and tables).

Review

Review articles refer to articles that summarize the current state of understanding on a topic. The prescribed word count is about 5,000 words excluding tables, references and abstract. The manuscript may have about 90 references.

Case Report

Case reports usually report new, interesting and rare cases. These cases should be unique, describing a great diagnostic or therapeutic challenge and providing a learning point for the readers. Cases with clinical significance or implications will be given priority. The manuscript could be of about 1,000 words (excluding references and abstract) and could be supported with about 10 references.

Editorial

Editorials are nearly always solicited, although unsolicited editorials may occasionally be considered. The word of Editorial is about 1,000 words, with about 10 references.

Letter to Editor

Letter to Editor should be about 500 words (excluding references) and include about 5 references.

Commentary

Commentaries are solicited by the editors; these manuscripts should include some relevant background information, comments on the paper, areas that need further investigation and future directions. Commentaries are generally about 1,000 words. Authors should notice that the manuscript you are commenting should be included in the references.

Format of manuscripts

Title

Please provide a concise and specific title that clearly reflects the content of the manuscript (no more than 12 notional words).

Also a running title should be provided (3-6 words).

Authors

Please list all authors that played a significant role in the research involved in the article. Please:

(1) list all authors’ full name (First name + Middle name + Last name). Once submitted, authors cannot be added or deleted and the order cannot be changed also without written consent of all authors.

(2) provide full affiliation information (the complete name of department, institution, city, postcode, province/state and country should be given) for all authors.

(3) indicate who is the corresponding author (there should be one corresponding author). The name, title, institution, address, and e-mail of the corresponding author should be given. Besides, an available telephone is greatly appreciated to have a prompt and better communication.

The abstract of original articles (200 words) should be formated with separate headings as Aim, Methods, Results, Conclusion. Review and Case Report generally have unstructured abstracts (200 and 100 words, respectively). Editorial, Commentary, and Letter to Editor have no abstract required. First person should not be used in abstract. Citations should not be used in the abstract. Abbreviations, if needed, should be spelled out.

Authors should supply up relevant key words (about 3-8) that describe the subject of their article to improve the visibility of your article.

Main body

The main body of the manuscripts differs from each other depending on different types.

Original Article: The main body of original articles should be divided into sections with the headings Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion.

Review: Review articles generally has section titles which depend upon the topic reviewed. There should be a section describing the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting, and synthesizing data (these methods should also be summarized in the abstract).

Case Report: Headings in the main body of case report should include Introduction, Case report, Discussion.

Ethics

Authors must indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Helsinki Declaration when reporting studies on human beings. Besides, when comes to prospective studies involving human participants, authors are also expected to mention about approval of regional/ national/ institutional or independent Ethics Committee or Review Board, obtaining informed consent from adult participants and obtaining assent for children aged over 7 years participating in the trial. The age beyond which assent would be required could vary as per regional and/ or national guidelines.Ensure confidentiality of subjects by desisting from mentioning participants’ names, initials or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. For studies involving animals, authors should indicate whether an institution’s or a national research council’s guide, such as the guidelines provided by Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA), or any national law on the care and use of laboratory animals was followed. Evidence for approval by a local Ethics Committee (for both human as well as animal studies) must be supplied by the authors on demand. Animal experimental procedures should be as humane as possible and the details of anesthetics and analgesics used should be clearly stated.

The journal will not consider any paper which is ethically unacceptable. A statement on ethics committee permission and ethical practices must be included in all Original Articles under the “Methods” section.

Selection and description of participants

Selection of the observational or experimental participants (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) should be described clearly, which also includes eligibility and exclusion criteria and a description of the source population.

Technical information

Identify the methods, apparatus (give the manufacturer’s name and address in parentheses), and procedures in sufficient detail to allow other workers to reproduce the results.

Give references to established methods, including statistical methods (see below); provide references and brief descriptions for methods that have been published but are not well known; describe new or substantially modified methods, give reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations.

Identify precisely all drugs and chemicals used, including generic name (s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration. Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol, assignment of interventions (methods of randomization, concealment of allocation to treatment groups), and the method of masking (blinding).

Statistics

Quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals) whenever possible.

Authors should report losses to observation (such as, dropouts from a clinical trial).

When data are summarized in the “Results” section, specify the statistical methods used to analyze them.

Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as “random” (which implies a randomizing device), “normal”,“significant”, “correlations”, and “sample”.

Define statistical terms, abbreviations, and most symbols.

Specify the computer software used. Use upper italics (P ＜ 0.048).

For all P values include the exact value and not less than 0.05 or 0.001.

Mean differences in continuous variables, proportions in categorical variables and relative risks including odds ratios and hazard ratios should be accompanied by their confidence intervals.

Consent

Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian, wherever applicable) gives written informed consent for publication. Authors should remove patients’ names from figures unless they have obtained written informed consent from the patients. When informed consent has been obtained, it should be indicated in the article and copy of the consent should be attached when submitting the manuscripts.

Contribution details

Contributors should provide a description of contributions made by each of them towards the manuscript. Description should be divided in following categories, as applicable: concept, design, definition of intellectual content, literature search, clinical studies, experimental studies, data acquisition, data analysis, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, manuscript editing and manuscript review. Authors’ contributions will be printed along with the article. One or more author should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole from inception to published article and should be designated as “guarantor”.

Conflicts of interest

All authors must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with publication of the manuscript or an institution or product that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or is important to the outcome of the study presented. Authors should also disclose conflict of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

Grant information (if necessary)

Please state who funded the work, whether it is your employer, a grant funder, etc.

Please do not list funding that you have that is not relevant to this specific piece of research.

For each funder, please state the funder’s name, the grant number where applicable, and the individual to whom the grant was assigned.

Acknowledgments (if necessary)

This section should acknowledge anyone who contributed to the research or the writing of the article but who does not qualify as an author.

References should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text (not in alphabetic order). Identify references in text, tables, and legends by Arabic numerals in superscript with square bracket after the punctuation marks. References cited only in tables or figure legends should be numbered in accordance with the sequence established by the first identification in the text of the particular table or figure. There should be no more than 5 continuous references cited in one position, like [1-10]. All authors’ names should be listed in the references. The names of journals should be abbreviated according to the style used in Index Medicus. Avoid using abstracts as references. Information from manuscripts submitted but not accepted should be cited in the text as “unpublished observations” with written permission from the source. Avoid citing a “personal communication” unless it provides essential information not available from a public source, in which case the name of the person and date of communication should be cited in parentheses in the text.Tables

Tables should be self-explanatory and should not duplicate textual material.

Tables with more than 10 columns and 25 rows are not acceptable.

Number tables, in Arabic numerals, consecutively in the order of their first citation in the text and supply a brief title for each. Place explanatory matter in footnotes, not in the heading.

Explain in footnotes all non-standard abbreviations that are used in each table.

Obtain permission for all fully borrowed, adapted, and modified tables and provide a credit line in the footnote.

For footnotes use the following symbols, in this sequence: *, †, ‡, §, ||,¶ , **, ††, ‡‡.

Tables with their legends should be provided at the end of the text after the references. The tables along with their number should be cited at the relevant place in the text.

Figures

Upload the images in JPEG format. The file size should be within 10 MB in size while uploading.

Figures should be numbered consecutively according to the order in which they have been first cited in the text.

Labels, numbers, and symbols should be clear and of uniform size. The lettering for figures should be large enough to be legible after reduction to fit the width of a printed column.

Symbols, arrows, or letters used in photomicrographs should contrast with the background and should be marked neatly with transfer type or by tissue overlay and not by pen.

Titles and detailed explanations belong in the legends for illustrations not on the illustrations themselves.

When graphs, scatter-grams or histograms are submitted the numerical data on which they are based should also be supplied. The photographs and figures should be trimmed to remove all the unwanted areas.

If photographs of individuals are used, their pictures must be accompanied by written permission to use the photograph.

If a figure has been published elsewhere, acknowledge the original source and submit written permission from the copyright holder to reproduce the material. A credit line should appear in the legend for such figures.

Legends for illustrations: Type or print out legends (maximum 40 words, excluding the credit line) for illustrations using double spacing, with Arabic numerals corresponding to the illustrations. When symbols, arrows, numbers, or letters are used to identify parts of the illustrations, identify and explain each one in the legend. Explain the internal scale (magnification) and identify the method of staining in photomicrographs.

Final figures for print production: Send sharp, glossy, un-mounted, color photographic prints, with height of 4 inches and width of 6 inches at the time of submitting the revised manuscript. Print outs of digital photographs are not acceptable. If digital images are the only source of images, ensure that the image has minimum resolution of 300 dpi or 1800 x 1600 pixels. Send the images on a CD. Each figure should have a label pasted (avoid use of liquid gum for pasting) on its back indicating the number of the figure, the running title, top of the figure and the legends of the figure. Do not write the contributor/s’name/s. Do not write on the back of figures, scratch, or mark them by using paper clips.

The Journal reserves the right to crop, rotate, reduce, or enlarge the photographs to an acceptable size.

BEFORE YOUR SUBMISSION

There is some information you must learn about before your submission.

Clinical trial registry

Hepatoma Research favors registration of clinical trials. The journal would publish clinical trials that have been registered with a clinical trial registry that allows free online access to public. Registration in the following trial registers is acceptable: https://clinicaltrials.gov/; http://www.isrctn.com/; http://www.trialregister.nl/trialreg/index.asp; and http://www.umin.ac.jp/ ctr/.This is applicable to clinical trials that have begun enrollment of subjects in or after June 2008. Clinical trials that have commenced enrollment of subjects prior to June 2008 would be considered for publication in Hepatoma Research only if they have been registered retrospectively with clinical trial registry that allows unhindered online access to public without charging any fees.

Reporting guidelines

Reporting guidelines have been developed for different study designs; examples include CONSORT for randomized trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and STARD for studies of diagnostic accuracy.

Publishing ethics

The journal strictly follows the guidelines of The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) on publication. For detailed information, please click Publishing Ethics.

Editorial policies

Authors are also appreciated to learn about and Compliance with our Editorial policies, please see Editorial Policies.

Copyrights

The entire contents of Hepatoma Research are protected under USA copyrights. Authors need to finish an assignment ofcopyright form to transfer the copyright to Hepatoma Research when their manuscripts were accepted. The journal will publish the manuscripts under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.

Peer review process

A manuscript will be reviewed for possible publication with the understanding that it is being submitted to Hepatoma Research alone at that point in time and has not been published anywhere, simultaneously submitted, or already accepted for publication elsewhere. The journal expects that authors would authorize one of them to correspond with the Journal for all matters related to the manuscript. All manuscripts received are duly acknowledged. On submission, editors review all submitted manuscripts initially for suitability for formal review. Manuscripts with insufficient originality, serious scientific or technical flaws, or lack of a significant message are rejected before proceeding for formal peer-review. Manuscripts that are unlikely to be of interest to the Hepatoma Research readers are also liable to be rejected at this stage itself.

Manuscripts that are found suitable for publication in Hepatoma Research are sent to two or more external expert reviewers. The reviewers should not be affiliated with the same institutes as the contributor/s. However, the selection of these reviewers is at the sole discretion of the editor. The journal follows a single-blind review process. After finishing the external review, every manuscript is also assigned to the Editor-in-Chief, who based on the comments from the reviewers takes a final decision on the manuscript. The comments and suggestions (acceptance/rejection/amendments in manuscript) received from reviewers are conveyed to the corresponding author. The author is requested to provide a point by point response to reviewers’ comments and submit a revised version of the manuscript. This process may be repeated till the manuscript is accepted.

Manuscripts accepted for publication are copy edited for grammar, punctuation, print style, and format. Page proofs are sent to the corresponding author. The corresponding author is expected to return the corrected proofs within three days. It may not be possible to incorporate corrections received after that period. The whole process of submission of the manuscript to final decision and sending and receiving proofs is completed online.

Manuscript charges

The journal does not charge for submission, processing or publication fee on article.

Publication shedule

Based on monthly publishing frequency, the journal publishes articles on its website immediately on acceptance and follows a “continuous publication” schedule.

SUBMISSION OF YOUR MANUSCRIPTS

All manuscripts must be submitted online through the website http://hrjournal.net/login. First time users will have to register at this site. Registration is free but mandatory. Registered authors can keep track of their articles after logging into the site using their user name and password. If you experience any problems, please contact the editorial office by e-mail at editorialoffice@hrjournal.net.

The submitted manuscripts that are not as per the “Author Instructions” would be returned to the authors for technical correction, before they undergo editorial/ peer-review. Generally, the manuscript should be submitted in the following form:

1. The type of manuscript (original article, case report, review article, letter to editor, images, etc.) title of the manuscript, running title, names of all authors/ contributors (with their highest academic degrees, designation and affiliations) and name(s) of department(s) and/ or institution(s) to which the work should be credited.Use text/rtf/doc files. Do not zip the files.

2. The total number of pages, total number of photographs and word counts separately for abstract and for the text (excluding the references, tables and abstract), word counts for introduction + discussion in case of an original article.

3. Source(s) of support in the form of grants, equipment, drugs, or all of these.

4. Acknowledgments, if any. One or more statements should specify 1) contributions that need acknowledging but do not justify authorship, such as general support by a departmental chair; 2) acknowledgments of technical help; and 3) acknowledgments of financial and material support, which should specify the nature of the support.

5. If the manuscript was presented as part at a meeting, the organization, place, and exact date on which it was read. A full statement to the editor about all submissions and previous reports that might be regarded as redundant publication of the same or very similar work. Any such work should be referred to specifically, and referenced in the new paper.

6. Registration number in case of a clinical trial and where it is registered (name of the registry and its URL).

7. Conflicts of Interest of each author/ contributor. A statement of financial or other relationships that might lead to a conflict of interest, if that information is not included in the manuscript itself or in an authors’ form.

8. Criteria for inclusion in the authors’/ contributors’ list.

9. A statement that the manuscript has been read and approved by all the authors, that the requirements for authorship as stated earlier in this document have been met, and that each author believes that the manuscript represents honest work, if that information is not provided in another form (see below);

10. The name, address, e-mail, and telephone number of the corresponding author, who is responsible for communicating with the other authors about revisions and final approval of the proofs, if that information is not included on the manuscript itself.

11. The main text of the article, beginning from Abstract till References (including tables) should be in this file. Use rtf/ doc files. Do not zip the files. Limit the file size to up to 4 MB. Do not incorporate images in the file. If file size is large, graphs can be submitted as images separately without incorporating them in the article file to reduce the size of the file.

12. Images: Images should be optimum for print production (About 1800 x 1600 pixels or 8 x 6 inches with 300 dpi). For Images, PowerPoint, Additional material, maximum size of the file being uploaded is 10 MB. (Please make sure the file size is 10 MB or less before uploading.) Images can be submitted as jpeg files. Do not zip the files. Legends for the figures/images should be included at the end of the article file.

13. The contributors’/copyright transfer form (template provided below) has to be submitted in original with the signatures of all the contributors within two weeks of submission via courier, fax or email as a scanned image. Print ready hard copies of the images (one set) or digital images should be sent to the journal office at the time of submitting revised manuscript. High resolution images (up to 5 MB each) can be sent by email. Contributors’ form / copyright transfer form

can be submitted online from the authors’ area on http://hrjournal.net/login.

SENDING A REVISED MANUSCRIPT

The revised version of the manuscript should be submitted online in a manner similar to that used for submission of the manuscript for the first time. When submitting a revised manuscript, contributors are requested to include, the “referees”remarks along with point to point clarification at the beginning in the revised file itself. In addition, they are expected to mark the changes as underlined or colored text in the article.