Vol 34 No 2 suppli final.pmd - IDA KERALA STATE ::. idakerala.com

On publishing an article
Publishing has become a compulsion and hence editorial offices of journals are
flooded with articles. This is no reflection of the scientific activities that take place
in the dental colleges. Majority of the articles fall into two categories: over view of
a topic (the so called review) and case reports. On most of the occasions the
former is a direct adaptation of text books and the latter, the report of singular
case. Most of the articles when submitted do not follow the basic rules described
in the 'Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals:
Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication' (Updated April 2010) published
by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.
Who is an author: Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions
to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of
data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions
1, 2, and 3. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all
those who qualify should be listed.
Protection of Human Subjects and Animals in Research: When reporting
experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures
followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee
on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki
Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008. When reporting experiments on animals,
authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care
and use of laboratory animals was followed.
Duplicate Submission: Most biomedical journals will not consider manuscripts
that are simultaneously being considered by other journals.
Preparing a Manuscript for Submission: Editors and reviewers spend many hours
reading the manuscripts, and therefore appreciate receiving manuscripts that are
easy to read and edit. The text of observational and experimental articles is usually
divided into the following sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.
This so-called "IMRAD" structure is not an arbitrary publication format but rather
a direct reflection of the process of scientific discovery. Other types of articles,
such as case reports, reviews, and editorials, probably need to be formatted
differently.
Double-spacing all portions of the manuscript-including the title page, abstract,
text, acknowledgments, references, individual tables, and legends-and generous
margins make it possible for editors and reviewers to edit the text line by line and
add comments and queries directly on the paper copy. If manuscripts are submitted
electronically, the files should be double-spaced to facilitate printing for reviewing
and editing. Authors should number all of the pages of the manuscript consecutively,
beginning with the title page, to facilitate the editorial process.
KDJ - Vol.34, No. 1 Supplement, March 2011
Editorial
Dr. K. Nandakumar
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