Preparing manuscript

Preparing your manuscript

The information below details the Rhinology online core elements that should be included in every submission and what information you need to provide.

Please also use our Template doc when preparing your article for submission. This will ensure a degree of conformity in order to facilitate the review and publication process for the benefit of our readers. In particular, please ensure you use page and line numbers throughout your article, as this will help enormously with the review process.

Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

Title page

The title page should:

• present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
  • a description of what the article reports
• list the full names, institutional addresses and email addresses for all authors
  • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
• indicate the corresponding author

Main text

• Use double line spacing
• Include line and page numbering
• Use SI units: Please ensure that all special characters used are embedded in the text, otherwise they will be lost during conversion to PDF
• Do not use page breaks in your manuscript
• Give clear headings of items in text.

Key message
Write the key message of your paper in max 50 words. Please do not include any citations in the key message. Avoid specialist abbreviations if possible

Keywords
Provide up to 5 key words using Mesh terms for indexing purposes

File formats

The following word processor file formats are acceptable for the main manuscript document:

• Microsoft word (DOC, DOCX)
• Rich text format (RTF)

Please note: editable files are required for processing in production. If your manuscript contains any non-editable files (such as PDFs) you will be required to re- submit an editable file when you submit your revised manuscript, or after editorial acceptance in case no revision is necessary.

Note that figures must be submitted as separate image files, not as part of the submitted manuscript file. For more information, see Preparing figures below.

Style and language

For editors and reviewers to accurately assess the work presented in your manuscript you need to ensure the English language is of sufficient quality to be understood. If you need help with writing in English you should:

• Ask a colleague who is a native English speaker to review your manuscript for clarity.
• Use our language editing service, where editors will improve the English to ensure that your meaning is clear and identify problems that require your review. We provide this service for 100 euro. We usually will return your manuscript within one week. If you require this service please contact the editorial assistant.

Figures

• Figures should be provided as separate files, not embedded in the main manuscript file.
• Each figure of a manuscript should be submitted as a single file that fits on a single page in portrait format.
• Figures with line drawings should still be editable, i.e. NOT a full jpeg incorporated in a ppt file. (graphpad, excel, ppt, adobe illustrator/photoshop files are acceptable).
• Tables should NOT be submitted as figures but should be included in the main manuscript file.
• Multi-panel figures (those with parts a, b, c, d etc.) should be submitted as a single composite file that contains all parts of the figure. The letters indicating each panel should be in uppercase in the upper left corner in a contrasting colour (i.e. black on white background or with on dark-grey to black background).
• Figures should be numbered in the order they are first mentioned in the text, and uploaded in this order.
• Figures should be named as follows: Last name first author_Figure 1.
• Figures should be uploaded in the correct orientation.
• Figure titles (max 15 words) and legends (max 300 words) should be provided in the main manuscript, not in the graphic file.
• Figure keys should be incorporated into the legend not into the figure (we will provide them in the figure).
• Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the illustration. Cropping figures improves accuracy when placing the figure in combination with other elements when the accepted manuscript is prepared for publication on our site. For more information on individual figure file formats, see our detailed instructions below.
• Individual figure files should not exceed 10 MB. If a suitable format is chosen, this file size is adequate for extremely high-quality figures.
• Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures (or tables) that have previously been published elsewhere. In order for all figures to be open access, authors must have permission from the rights holder if they wish to include images that have been published elsewhere in non-open access journals. Permission should be indicated in the figure legend, and the original source included in the reference list.

Figure file types

We accept the following file formats for figures:

• EPS (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
• PDF (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
• Microsoft Word (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
• PowerPoint (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
• TIFF (suitable for images)
• JPEG (suitable for photographic images, less suitable for graphical images)
• PNG (suitable for images)
• BMP (suitable for images)

Figures are resized during publication of the final full text and PDF versions to conform to the Rhinology Online format, detailed below.

Figures on the web:

• width of 600 pixels (standard), 1200 pixels (high resolution).

Figures in the final PDF version:

• width of 85 mm for half page width figure
• width of 170 mm for full page width figure
• maximum height of 225 mm for figure and legend
• image resolution of approximately 300 dpi (dots per inch) at the final size

Figures should be designed such that all information, including text (font size), is legible at these dimensions. All lines should be wider than 0.25 pt when constrained to standard figure widths. All fonts must be embedded. Preferred font is Myriad Pro.

Figure file compression:

• Vector figures should if possible be submitted as PDF files, which are usually more compact than EPS files.
• TIFF files should be saved with LZW compression, which is lossless (decreases file size without decreasing quality) in order to minimize upload time.
• JPEG files should be saved at maximum quality.
• Conversion of images between file types (especially lossy formats such as JPEG) should be kept to a minimum to avoid degradation of quality.

Tables

• Tables should be numbered and cited in the text in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e. Table 1, Table 2 etc.).
• All tables should be placed at the end of the document text file.
• Larger datasets, or tables too wide for A4 or Letter landscape page can be uploaded as additional files.
• Tabular data provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls) or comma separated values (.csv). Please use the standard file extensions.
• Table titles (max 15 words) should be included above the table, and legends (max 300 words) should be included underneath the table.
• Tables should NOT be embedded as figures or spreadsheet files, but should be formatted using 'Table object' function in your word processing program.
• Do NOT use spaces or hard returns in your tables. Formatting like text alignment should be used instead.
• Color and shading may not be used. Parts of the table can be highlighted using superscript, numbering, lettering, symbols or bold text, the meaning of which should be explained in a table legend.
• Commas should not be used to indicate numerical values.

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• Ethics approval and consent to participate
• Consent for publication
• Authorship contribution
• Availability of data and material
• Conflict of interest
• Authors' information (optional)

Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section.

Acknowledgements

Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the 'Acknowledgements' section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

Funding

All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

• include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
• include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee's reference number if appropriate

Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval. If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

 

Consent for publication

If your manuscript contains any individual person's data in any form (including individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

You can use your institutional consent form or any other consent form that you prefer. The consent form should contain a signature of the patient/parent/ guardian/relative. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

Please keep this consent form in the patient's case files. The manuscript reporting this patient's details should state that 'Written informed consent for publication of their clinical details and/or clinical images was obtained from the patient/parent/guardian/relative of the patient. A copy of the consent form is available for review by the Editor of this journal.

If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

Authorship contribution

The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section.

Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "WJ wrote the protocol and collected the patient data, PH analyzed and interpreted the patient data. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

Availability of data and materials

Rhinology Online strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible.

All manuscripts must include an 'Availability of data and materials' statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

• The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].
• The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
• The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
• The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
• Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs.

Conflict of interest

All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

Please use the authors initials to refer to each author's competing interests in this section.

If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

Authors' information

This section is optional.

You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials.

Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

References

All references, including URLs, must be numbered consecutively, in brackets, in the order in which they are cited in the text, followed by any in tables or legends. The reference numbers must be finalized and the reference list fully formatted before submission.

• References are listed in numerical order, and in the same order in which they are cited in text. The reference list appears at the end of the paper.
• Begin your reference list on a new page and title it 'References.'
• The reference list should include all and only those references you have cited in the text. (However, do not include unpublished items such as correspondence.)
• Use Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).
• Abbreviate journal titles in the style used in the NLM Catalog.
• Check the reference details against the actual source – you are indicating that you have read a source when you cite it.
• Be consistent with your referencing style across the document. Example reference style:

Fokkens WJ. The future in Rhinology: from local treatment, to monoclonals and influencing the microbiome. Rhinology. 2017 Dec 1;55(4):289-290.