Diabetic Medicine

Journal of Diabetes UK

Edited by:
Sally M. Marshall

Print ISSN: 0742-3071
Online ISSN: 1464-5491
Frequency: Monthly
Current Volume: 26 / 2009
ISI Journal Citation Reports® Ranking: 2008: 39/93 Endocrinology & Metabolism
Impact Factor: 3.172

TopAuthor Guidelines

Manuscript Submission

All manuscripts should be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dme. A user ID and password for the site can be obtained on first use. Online submission ensures the quickest possible review and allows authors to track the progress of their papers online. It is recommended that text files are uploaded as Microsoft Word documents (all versions except Word 2007), generic rich text format (RTF) files and figures as JPEG, GIF, TIFF or EPS files. Please include a word count for a) the abstract and b) the article. Help is available online or by e-mailing support@scholarone.com.

Paperwork required upon submission
Papers accepted must be licensed for publication in the Journal, and an Exclusive Licence Form (available at www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/DME_ELF.pdf as well as a Declaration of Competing Interests form (available at www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/DME_DCI.pdf) must accompany every submitted paper (for the Open Access service please refer to the OnlineOpen section below). Authors will be required to license copyright for their paper to Wiley Blackwell.

Please complete the two forms and send them to the Editorial Assistant as scanned attachments in JPEG or TIFF format (saved with your DME reference number in the file name) via e-mail to dme_editorial@wiley.com. If you are unable to send the forms electronically, please notify the Editorial Office and post any hard copies to:

Diabetic Medicine Editorial Office
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
9600 Garsington Road
Oxford OX4 2DQ
United Kingdom

Fax: +44 (0)1865 471 387

Please note that we no longer accept faxed copies.

In addition, please include a Declaration of Competing Interests within the text, placing it just before the References. Although the Editors will not reject a paper simply because of a competing interest, they will publish a statement of declared interests. As detailed on the form, if you have answered 'yes' to any of the four questions relating to financial competing interests, your statement might, for example, read:

"Declaration of Competing Interests: Dr John Smith has been reimbursed by company "Y", manufacturers of Products "X", for attending several conferences. Prof Elizabeth Jones has been paid by 'X' Company for running educational programmes and her research registrar has also been paid for by this Company. Mr James Goldsworth has shares in the Company.'

If you have answered no to all of the questions, then simply state in the manuscript:

"Declaration of Competing Interests: Nothing to declare"

Please note that papers will NOT be sent for review and will be returned to authors if the completed ELF and DCI forms are not sent to the Editorial Assistant on submission.

OnlineOpen

OnlineOpen is a pay-to-publish service from Blackwell that offers authors whose papers are accepted for publication the opportunity to pay up-front for their manuscript to become open access (i.e. free for all to view and download) via the Blackwell website. Each OnlineOpen article will be subject to a one-off fee of $3000 to be met by or on behalf of the Author in advance of publication. Upon online publication, the article (both full-text and PDF versions) will be available to all for viewing and download free of charge. The print version of the article will also be branded as OnlineOpen and will draw attention to the fact that the paper can be downloaded for free online.

Any authors wishing to have their paper published OnlineOpen will be required to complete the standard Exclusive Licence Form as well as a payment order form available at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/DME_OOF.pdf or from the Editorial Office. Please note this payment form is for use with OnlineOpen material ONLY.

Once complete this form should be sent to the Editorial Office on submission of the manuscript online. Prior to acceptance there is no requirement to inform the Editorial Office that you do not intend to publish your paper OnlineOpen if you do not wish to.

The copyright statement for OnlineOpen authors will read:

©2009 The Author(s)
Journal compilation ©2009 Diabetes UK

Presentation

Authors should familiarize themselves with the style and content of articles in Diabetic Medicine before preparing a manuscript. The Editor retains the right to refuse a manuscript at any stage of the publication process, and to publish a paper under whatever group heading is considered appropriate. The Editor's decision is final.

Reviewers

Authors are asked to facilitate the review process by providing the names andemail addresses of at least three suitable reviewers, on the understanding that the Editor is not bound by any such nomination. Failure to follow this request may delay the handling of your paper, since the editorial office may specifically ask you to nominate potential reviewers for papers covering unfamiliar areas.

Types of Article

The following types of article will be considered for publication:

Original Articles Original research studies of relevance to diabetes mellitus science and practice. Clinical science and clinically relevant basic science papers will be considered. Maximum length 3000 words, with 30 references.

Clinical Practice Original articles focusing on issues directly related to the clinical presentations and management of diabetes mellitus.

Epidemiology Papers considered for this section are most likely to be successful if they are the first contemporary report of the prevalence of, for example, glucose intolerance (or the first report using good methodology) in a particular population group, preferably in which there is international interest, and/or if through the description of the distribution of, for example, diabetes or glucose intolerance by particular population characteristics or by identifying an association with putative risk markers, the data suggest new aetiological or pathogenic hypotheses.

Short Reports Brief (1500 words, with one Figure and one Table and up to 30 references) reports of original or important observations. Rapid publication can be offered in this category.

Case Reports Descriptions of unusual clinical cases carrying a new or important message.

Reviews Often invited, but unsolicited reviews are welcomed. All will undergo peer review. Reviews should aim to be comprehensive and should include the search methodology used to find the source data. Maximum length 5000 words and 50 references.

Special Reports Often, but not exclusively, publication of Diabetes UK reports of importance to the diabetes research and clinical practice community.

Technical Reports Short reports of newly available products with independent observation of their usefulness.

Letters Comments on previously published papers, items of topical interest, and brief original communications are encouraged for consideration under this heading. The length, including references, should not exceed 800 words plus one figure or table. The letter should not normally be divided into sections. Please give the name and addresses of authors at the end of the letter.

Media review Book reviews etc.

Layout

Original articles should conform to the uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals - the Vancouver style (Br Med J 1988; 296: 401-405) - as adopted by Diabetic Medicine. The layout should be divided conventionally into subsections, each starting on a new page.

Title page should include the title; authors (initials and surnames but without qualifications); authors' affiliations; name and full address of the author who will check proofs and deal with correspondence (with telephone, fax numbers and E-mail); a running title not exceeding 75 characters including spaces.

Second page A structured summary (no more than 250 words) should describe the content of the paper accurately and the important conclusions, couched in terms which will be understood by the majority of readers of the Journal. The main headings should be aims, methods, results, conclusions. A list of key words (no more than 5) should be given for reference purposes together with a list of abbreviations used.

Third page should begin with the Introduction followed by a full description of the methods (generally entitled Patients and Methods) then the Results and a Discussion. The correct hierarchy of headings and subheadings should be indicated.

Footnotes should not be used except in tables.

A Declaration of Competing Interests statement must be included in the manuscript, placed just above the reference section (please refer to the "Paperwork" section above for more details). Although the Editors will not reject a paper simply because of a competing interest, they will publish a statement of declared interests.

References are only acceptable if already published or if formal acceptance has been given for publication when the journal title is followed by ('in press'); they are indicated in the text by bracketed numbers and listed in order of quotation in the text, and given in the Vancouver style, for example:

1. Klein R. The epidemiology of diabetic eye disease. In Pickup J, G Williams eds. Textbook of Diabetes, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell Science 1997: 44:1-9
2. Sculpher MJ, Buxton MJ, Ferguson BA, Humphreys JE, Altman JFB, Spiegelhalter DJ et al. A relative cost-effectiveness analysis of different methods of screening for diabetic retinopathy. Diabet Med 1991; 8: 644-650.

3. Jarrett RJ. Insulin and hypertension (Letter). Lancet 1987; ii: 748-749.

Figures and Illustrations

Illustrations should be separate from the text, and numbered with Arabic numerals. Either screen or high quality electronic images can be included in online submissions, higher quality files can be supplied at acceptance.

Please send us digital versions of your figures. Ideally these should be sent as EPS (line art) or TIFF (photograph/bitmap), or as line art embedded in a word processor document. Avoid using tints less than 20% apart; if they are essential to the understanding of the figure, try to make them coarse. Always enclose a hard copy of digitally supplied figures. Further details can be found at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/authors/digill.asp.

Figures will be reduced to single column width (80 mm), two-thirds page width (110 mm) or full page width (169 mm) and should be planned accordingly.

Figure legends must be comprehensive in isolation from the text: they should include keys to symbols and indicate the statistical significance of differences.

Tables

These should be created where possible using the table creation facility of your word processing software or typed double spaced on a separate sheet and identified by Arabic numerals corresponding to the order in which they appear in the manuscript. A brief title should head the table. Explanatory matters should be in a footnote.

Previous Publication

Papers are accepted on the understanding that no substantial part has been, or will be, published elsewhere. Data that have been published as an abstract of no more than 300 words in a scientific meeting are acceptable. The abstract reference should be quoted under the summary. Papers may be subject to editorial revision without notice and remain the copyright of Diabetes UK. If a paper returned to authors for revision is not received back in the editorial office by a deadline which will be imposed by the Editor, it will be treated as a new submission. The Editors reserve the right to make the final decision whether or not a paper is accepted.

Statement of Consent

Authors must indicate in the text the way in which they have complied with the recommendations of the Declaration of Helsinki (British Medical Journal, 1964, ii, 177). Experimental human studies should first have been approved by a local Ethical Committee, and a statement to this effect should be included. If a patient may be identified from material accepted for publication in Diabetic Medicine (including case reports and illustrations), we require the written consent of the patient to allow publication. Black bands across the eyes are not effective in masking the identity of the patient, and changing details of the patient in an attempt to disguise them is bad scientific practice. A suggested consent form is available at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/dme_consent.pdf or from the Editorial office.

Proofs

The corresponding author will receive an email alert containing a link to a web site. A working e-mail address must therefore be provided for the corresponding author. The proof can be downloaded as a PDF (portable document format) file from this site. Acrobat Reader will be required in order to read this file. This software can be downloaded (free of charge) from the following web site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.

This will enable the file to be opened, read on screen and printed out in order for any corrections to be added. Further instructions will be sent with the proof. Hard copy proofs will be posted if no e-mail address is available. Only corrections of factual or typesetting errors are possible at proofs stage.

Author material archive policy

Please note that unless specifically requested, Blackwell Publishing will dispose of all hardcopy or electronic material submitted two months after publication. If you require the return of any material submitted, please inform the editorial office or production editor as soon as possible if you have not yet done so.

Offprints

Authors will be provided with electronic offprints of their article. Paper offprints may be ordered at the prices quoted on the order form, which accompanies the proofs, provided that the form is returned to the address indicated on the form. Offprints are normally despatched within 2 weeks of publication of the issue in which the paper appears. Please contact the publishers if offprints do not arrive: however, please note that offprints are sent by surface mail, so overseas orders may take up to 6 weeks to arrive. Electronic offprints are sent to the first author at his or her first email address on the title page of the paper, unless advised otherwise; therefore please ensure that the name, address and email of the corresponding author are clearly indicated on the manuscript title page if he or she is not the first author of the paper.

There are no page charges other than the colour reproduction charges indicated above.

Style Guide

Diabetic Medicine does not recognise the term 'diabetic' as a noun. 'People with diabetes' or 'diabetic patients' are acceptable. The terms 'Type 1' and 'Type 2 diabetes mellitus' (abbreviated to Type 1 and Type 2 DM) are preferable to IDDM and NIDDM.

Abbreviations and Units

SI units must be used throughout except for blood pressure (mmHg) and haemoglobin (g/l). Gas or pressure values should be given as mmHg with kPa in parentheses or vice versa. Where molecular weight is known, the amount of a substance should be expressed in mol or appropriate subunit (mmol). Energy should be expressed in kcal or joules (J). The solidus may be used in a unit as long as it does not have to be employed more than once (e.g. mmol/l is acceptable), but ml/min/kg is not acceptable and should be replaced with ml min-1 kg-1.

Visual Impairment

If you have difficulty reading Diabetic Medicine owing to the size of the text, it is possible to download the journal in a larger format from the internet. The electronic version of Diabetic Medicine is available online. Please see http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/dme.

OnlineEarly

Diabetic Medicine is covered by Blackwell Publishing's OnlineEarly service. OnlineEarly articles are complete full-text articles published online in advance of their publication in a printed issue. Articles are therefore available as soon as they are ready, rather than having to wait for the next scheduled print issue. OnlineEarly articles are complete and final. They have been fully reviewed, revised and edited for publication, and authors' final corrections have been incorporated. Because they are in final form, no changes can be made after online publication. The nature of OnlineEarly articles mean that they do not yet have volume, issue or page numbers, so OnlineEarly articles cannot be cited in the traditional way. They are therefore given a Digital Object Indentifier (DOI), which allows the article to be cited and tracked before it is allocated to an issue. After print publication, the DOI remains valid and can continued to be used to cite and access the article. More information about DOIs can be found at http://www.doi.org/faq.html.

Author Services

NEW: Online production tracking is now available for articles through Blackwell's Author Services.

Author Services enables authors to track their article - once it has been accepted - through the production process to publication online and in print. Authors can check the status of their articles online and choose to receive automated e-mails at key stages of production so they do not need to contact the Production Editor to check on progress. Visit www.blackwellpublishing.com/bauthor for more details on online production tracking and for a wealth of resources including FAQs and tips on article preparation, submission and more.

Disclaimer

The Publisher and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal, the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Publisher and the Editors, neither does the publication of advertisements constitute any endorsement by the Publisher and Editors of the products advertised.