Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications

Instructions for Authors

Journal Publication Policy

Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) supports the ethical principles set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

All journal stakeholders and authors are required to observe high standards with respect to publication ethics as set out by COPE and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors(ICMJE).

Authorship

It is important that a ppropriate credit is awarded to the authors of a manuscript. In accordance with ICMJE guidelines to qualify as an author, a researcher should make substantive intellectual contributions to each of the following aspects:

1. Concept and design of the study, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data.

2. Critically drafting or revising of the manuscript for important intellectual content.

3. Final approval of the version to be published. Each author should participate sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not justify authorship.

4. Be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

How to Submit

Submissions to Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications(CVIA) are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts, the online submission and peer review system.Registration and access is available at:

https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/cvia-journal.

Full information and guidance on using ScholarOne

Manuscripts is available here:

http://mchelp.manuscriptcentral.com/gethelpnow/

Distinguish yourself with ORCID

ORCID iD is a unique and persistent identifier th at distinguishes you from every other researcher and connects you to your research activities, so you always get the credit for your work. We encourage submitting authors to provide an ORCID iD when submitting a manuscript. Including your ORCID iD with your article submission improves the discoverability of your work and creates more opportunity for recognition.

You can register for an ORCID-iD at https://orcid.org/register

Confl ict of Interests

All authors are required to complete a standard conflict of interests/competing interests form. This form will be sent to all authors of accepted papers at the end of the peer review process. This should be returned together with your revised manuscript. Authors must declare any competing interests by completing our standard form. Conflict of interests/competing interests can be defined as factors which could influence the judgment of an author, reviewer or editors, and may be personal, commercial, political, academic, or financial in nature. Put simply, they are interests which, if revealed later,would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived.

Writers of letters and editorials must also declare competing interests. Reviewers are also required to declare competing interests and in most cases these reviewers with competing interests will not be asked to proceed with the review.

Statements of competing interests are included in the online versions of research articles.

For additional guidance and information on the topic of conflict of interests and competing interests please refer to the ICMJE recommendations on author responsibility and COPE’s“Responsible research publication: international standards for authors” document.

A sample of our Authorship Form is available for download at http://cvia-journal.org/for-authors/

Funding Acknowledgements

From 2015 Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications(CVIA) requires all research articles to have a funding acknowledgement statement included in the manuscript. The statement should be placed under a heading entitled ‘Funding’directly after your Acknowledgements and Declaration of Conflicting Interests, if applicable.

We require details of the funding agency to be supplied in full, followed by the grant number in square brackets. Multiple grant numbers should be separated by comma and space,see following example:

This work was supported by the Medical Research Council[grant number xxx, yyy, zzz].

Where the research was supported by multiple sources, the different agencies should be separated by a semi-colon, with“and” before the final funder. Such as:

This work was supported by the Medical Research Council[grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the National Science Fund [grant number zzzz]; and the International Research Body [grant number xxxx].

Where the research is not funded by a specific project grant,but from other resources available to a university, college or other research institution, such as the block grant, the following statement should be used:

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Text Recycling

“Text Recycling” or “self-plagiarism” as it is sometimes called occurs when an author reuses passages of text from his/her own previously published work in a new submission.

As Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) is a member of CrossCheck’s plagiarism detection initiative,all instances of text recycling will be detected. When such instances are detected the COPE Guidelines on text recycling will be followed.

Duplication

All manuscripts submitted to Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) should be original and not under consideration by another publication. Apart from causing potential problems from an ethical and international copyright law perspective, the duplicate publication of original research is problematic in a medical context because it can result in inadvertent double-counting of data or inappropriate weighting of the results of a single study, which can distort the available evidence. In instances where substantial parts of the text in the submission may overlap, we ask our authors to be open and let us know of any concerns when they submit their manuscripts. Each issue will be dealt with on a case-bycase basis in accordance with ICMJE recommendations on overlapping publications.

In the event that Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications(CVIA) becomes aware of violations of publication ethics after the article has already been published, then the article may warrant retraction with or without the author’s explanation or approval. In any such event Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) will adhere to the COPE fl owcharts when dealing with the suspected violations.

Plagiarism

Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) is a member of CrossCheck’s plagiarism detection initiative and uses plagiarism detection software. If plagiarism is identified,the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.

Clinical Trials Registration

Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) adheres to ICMJE’s Clinical Trials Registration Statement. All clinical trials published in the journal must be registered in a public trials registry at or before the onset of participant enrolment.Manuscripts should include the exact URL and unique identification number for the trial registration at the time of submission. This information will be published in the article and we ask that you include the URL and identification number on the title page of your manuscript.

For any clinical trials commencing prior to 2008, retrospective registration will be accepted. A list of recommended registries can be found on the ICMJE website. Results posted in the same clinical trials registry in which the primary registration resides will not be considered prior to publication if they are presented in the form of a brief abstract (500 words or less) or a table.

Registration of Systematic Reviews

The prospective registration of systematic reviews is welcomed and we encourage all authors to register their systematic reviews in a suitable registry (such as PROSPERO). Please include the registration number in the last line of the manuscript abstract.

Standards of Reporting

Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) requires all authors to follow the correct standards of reporting regarding biomedical research. Please refer to EQUATOR for guidelines for health research and MIBBI for guidelines and tools for bioscience reporting. Authors are strongly encouraged to use these guidelines as a checklist when writing their manuscripts.

Other available checklists include CONSORT for randomized controlled trials, PRISMA for systematic reviews, STROBE for observational studies, MOOSE for meta analyses of observational studies, STARD for diagnostic accuracy studies,RATS for qualitative studies, and CHEERS for economic evaluations.

Authors of systematic reviews must provide a link in the Methods section that shows all details of the search strategy.

Refer to Cochrane Reviewers’ Handbook for examples of the presentation of search strategies.

Authors must use standardized gene nomenclature. The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee details human gene symbols and names. Information on other species can be found at www.genenames.org/about/faq#otherspecies; the Human Genome Variation Society provides guidelines on mutation nomenclature.

Authors are expected to comply with current field-specific standards regarding the preparation and recording of data(www.biosharing.org/standards/), while also maintaining strict patient confidentiality. In addition, when using unpublished data, authors must make contact with the owners of the data before starting their own research.

Human and Animal Testing

All human or animal studies should be approved or exempted by the appropriate institutional human and/or animal subject review committee, or if no formal ethics committee is available, are in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 2013. This approval or exemption should be stated in the Methods section of the article.

When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals are followed. Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the International Association of Veterinary Editors’ Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare.

Patient Consent

All authors must declare that, where relevant, patient consent has been obtained (or the consent of their parent or guardian in the case of children under 16) and that all reasonable steps have been taken to maintain patient confidentiality, including illustrations, which should be anonymized as far as possible.

Research and Publication Misconduct

Any allegations of potential research or publication misconduct will be investigated in adherence with the COPE guidelines on how to deal with cases of suspected misconduct.

Appeals and Complaints

Appeals

All authors have the right to appeal the rejection of their manuscript. Authors can appeal directly by contacting the editorial office. Appeals will be reviewed in the context of the manuscript’s scientific content and its suitability for publication.

The Editor-in-Chief’s decision on the appeal will be final.

Complaints

All complaints can be made directly to the editorial office.

They will be happy to outline the complaint procedure in full.

Presentation and Format

• Double spacing

• Margins 2.5 cm from all four sides

• Page numbers included at bottom

• Title page contains all the required information

• Running title (not more than 50 characters)

• Abstract page contains the full title of the manuscript

• Abstracts: For original articles, structured abstracts of 250 words or fewer; all other articles, unstructured abstracts of about 150 words, excluding letters to the Editor

• Key words in English (three to eight)

• Introduction (of 75–100 words)

• Headings in title case (not ALL CAPITALS)

• References cited in the text should be before punctuation marks, within square brackets

• References listed according to the journal’s instructions,punctuation marks checked

• Send the article file without ‘Track Changes’

• Uniformly American English

• Write the full term for each abbreviation at its first use in the title, abstract, keywords and text separately unless it is a standard unit of measure

• Spell out numerals from 1 to 10, unless used in conjunction with an SI unit.

• Spell out numerals at the beginning of the sentence

• Check the manuscript for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors

• If a brand name is cited, supply the manufacturer’s name and address (city and state/country)

• Species names should be in italics

• Length of articles: 4,000 words; case reports 1,500

Main Text

Certain types of articles should be structured using the IMRAD format.

Language and Grammar

• Uniformly American English

• Write the full term for each abbreviation at its first use in the title, abstract, keywords and text separately unless it is a standard unit of measure

• Spell out numerals from 1 to 10, unless used in conjunction with an SI unit.

• Spell out numerals at the beginning of the sentence

• Check the manuscript for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors

• Species names should be in italics

Title

The title page should include a clear and concise title (please avoid abbreviations), author names and affiliations, as well as corresponding author information (email address must be included).

Authorship

A researcher should make substantive intellectual contributions to each of the following aspects to qualify for authorship:

1. Concept and design of the study, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data.

2. Critically drafting or revising of the manuscript for important intellectual content.

3. Final approval of the version to be published. Each author should participate sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not justify authorship.

Significance Statement (120 words maximum)

We ask all authors of Research Articles to prepare a short,120-word-maximum, statement about the significance of their research paper written at a level understandable to an undergraduate-educated scientist outside their field of specialty.

The primary goal of the Significance Statement is to explain the relevance of the work in broad context to a broad readership.The Significance Statement will appear within the paper below the abstract and is required for all research papers.

By highlighting the scientific merit of your research, these statements will help make your work more visible to our readership. We will then be in a position to use these statements to further promote your article and potentially enhance the overall impact of your research.

Data and Materials Sharing

CVIA is committed to improving scholarly communications and as part of this commitment, authors may make materials, data and associated protocols available to readers. The preferred way to do this is to publicly deposit the data as noted below.Supplemental material can mean anything from tables to datasets, filesets to presentations, video to audio files.

Including supplemental material with your article makes it more discoverable, and CVIA will ensure it is effectively linked to, within your article abstract.

Why include supplemental material with your journal article?

1. It makes your article more discoverable, giving people another route to find your research.

2. Other researchers can cite your supplemental material,increasing the impact of your work.

3. Funders are able to identify clear links to data, ensuring you meet your funding requirements.

4. Your supplemental data is effectively preserved.

5. Research shows that articles with supplemental material are downloaded and cited more often.

To support this, if you wish, CVIA can include links on your article abstract to the associated data.

How do I link my article to its data?

If you are considering publishing an article withus, and wish to link to supplemental material hosted in a particular data bank, please follow these steps:

1. Submit your datasets to an appropriate public data repository. Data should be submitted to discipline-specific,community-recognized repositories where possible, or to generalist repositories if no suitable community resource is available.

2. Where suitable domain-specific repositories do not exist,authors may deposit in, for example, HYPERLINK “http://datadryad.org/” Dryad, HYPERLINK “http://dataverse.org/”Dataverse, the HYPERLINK “https://osf.io/” Open Science Framework, or an institutional repository and provide the correct access information with the manuscript.Alternatively, authors may choose to deposit nonstandard data (including figures, posters, rich media) on HYPERLINK “http://figshare.com/” Figshare for example.In all cases, the correct data DOI reference (where applicable) should be provided when submitting the final version of your article.

3. In all cases, the correct accession/deposition reference numbers/data DOIs must be provided in the manuscript.

4. Remember to check that the licensing policies of the data repository that you choose are suitable for your purposes.The HYPERLINK “http://www.datacite.org/” “_blank”DataCite organisation has a growing list of repositories for research data.

5. Please remember to update your chosen data bank with the article DOI on publication.

Are my data files subject to peer/editorial review?

No, we don’t expect that the data files will be subject to any special data review or scrutiny.

Abstract

A structured abstract includes four sections:

1. Objective, the purpose of the study;

2. Methods, the study process and statistical methods;

3. Results, the main findings of the study;

4. Conclusion, the significance and implications of the findings.

Please minimize use of abbreviations and avoid using references in the abstract.

The abstract should not exceed 250 words.

Key words

Please list three to eight key words representing the main content of the paper.

Introduction

The author should provide background knowledge in the related field and important literature on the issue under

discussion. The section should end with a brief statement on what is being reported in the article and the expected contribution to the study.

Methods

The author should clearly state the study design, the setting,any materials and/or subjects involved, any sampling and/or grouping methods, any interventions, and methods for statistical analysis. The author should generally use generic names instead of trade names. However, if there are critical differences among proprietary products, trade names should be used followed by generic descriptions, both in parentheses.

If human subjects are involved in the study, an ethical approval by the appropriate committee should be noted and an “informed consent” statement should be included in the manuscript.

Results

The author should state only the main findings of the study in a clear and simple way, always remembering to avoid repetitive presentation of the data through text and tables.

Results of statistical analyses should include, where appropriate, relative and absolute risks or risk reductions, and confidence intervals.

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.

Specify the computer software used. For all P values include the exact value, not ＜ 0.05 or 0.001.

Discussion

The author should give an interpretation of the results,and point out the relevance and significance of the implications.

You may also modestly admit the limitations of the study and point out a direction for further research in the related field.

Acknowledgements

Major contributors to the study who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be given thanks in the Acknowledgements section.

Make sure to obtain permissions prior to citing any names/organizations here. Please also include the sources of funding for the study.

Confl icts of Interest

All authors must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with the publication of the manuscript or an institution or product that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or the outcome of the study presented.

Authors should also disclose conflicts of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

Electronic Sources as Reference

Journal article on the Internet

Abood S. Quality improvement initiative in nursing homes:the ANA acts in an advisory role. Am J Nurs [serial on the Internet]. 2002 Jun [cited 2002 Aug 12]; 102(6): [about 3 p.].Available from: http://www.nursingworld.org/AJN/2002/june/Wawatch.htm

Monograph on the Internet

Foley KM, Gelband H, editors. Improving palliative care for cancer [monograph on the Internet]. Washington: National Academy Press; 2001 [cited 2002 Jul 9]. Available from:

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309074029/html/.

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/.

Part of a Homepage/Website

American Medical Association [homepage on the Internet].Chicago: The Association; c1995–2002 [updated 2001 Aug 23; cited 2002 Aug 12]. AMA Office of Group Practice Liaison;[about two screens]. Available from: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/1736.html

Figures and Tables

• Please number tables consecutively in the order of their appearance in the text.

• Provide a clear and concise title above the table and use footnotes for explanatory matters below the table.

• Please use double-spacing and do not use internal horizontal or vertical lines.

• Make sure each column has a short heading.

• Use the following symbols in footnotes in sequence:

• Please also number the figures consecutively in the order of their appearance in the text.

• The figures should be of high quality and be selfexplanatory with symbols, arrows or letters indicating the important areas in the figure.

• Provide titles and detailed explanations in the legends below the figures.

Units of Measurement

• Measurements of length, height, weight, and volume should be in metric units (meter, kilogram, or liter).

• Temperatures should be in degrees Celsius. Blood pressures should be in millimetres of mercury.

• Please refer to International System of Units (SI) for more information.

Abbreviations and Symbols

Use standard abbreviations. In the case of non-standard abbreviations, on first mention please write out the term in full,followed by the abbreviation in parentheses.