Acta Neuropsychiatrica

Edited by:
Gin S. Malhi

Print ISSN: 0924-2708
Online ISSN: 1601-5215
Frequency: Bi-monthly
Current Volume: 22 / 2010
ISI Journal Citation Reports® Ranking: 2008: 175/219 Neurosciences; 75/101 Psychiatry
Impact Factor: 1.38

TopAuthor Guidelines

Submissions

All manuscript submissions to Acta Neuropsychiatrica must be completed electronically through the Acta Neuropsychiatrica ScholarOne Manuscripts (formerly known as Manuscript Central) website (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ACN). Authors are requested to submit all text, tables, figures, and artwork in electronic form to this address. Manuscript submissions must include a cover letter stating the contributions of each author to the paper and that the manuscript has not been and will not be submitted elsewhere for publication. The cover letter must also include five potential reviewers who are especially qualified to referee the work and do not have a conflict of interest in reviewing the manuscript.

For initial submissions the following items must be uploaded: a cover letter (saved as a separate file), suggested reviewers, the body of the manuscript (including title page, structured abstract, manuscript text, references, and table/figure legends), tables, and figures. Authors should ensure their manuscripts are formatted to the specifications below. Revised manuscripts should also be accompanied by a unique file (separate from the cover letter) with point by point responses to reviewers' comments. Files should be labeled with appropriate and descriptive file names (e.g., MainText.doc, Fig1.eps, Table3.doc).

All files should be uploaded separately. The file containing the text, references, tables and figure captions, should be prepared to the specifications described below. This file must not include graphics. The preferred file format is Word (.doc) or rich text format (.rtf), but Word-compatible word processor files (e.g. .wpd) and LaTeX2e files will also usually be acceptable.

Copyright

Authors submitting a manuscript do so in the understanding that they agree to submit a completed Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA) to Acta Neuropsychiatrica if and when the paper is accepted for publication. The work shall not be published elsewhere in any language without the written consent of the publisher. The articles published in this journal are protected by copyright, which covers translation rights and the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute all of the articles printed in the journal. No material published in the journal may be stored on microfilm or videocassettes or in electronic databases and the like or reproduced photographically without the prior written permission of the publisher. Authors are to be reminded to tick one of the boxes found on page 2 of the CTA form.

Please scan and return your completed CTA form to :
Ruth Oh
Production Editor
roh@wiley.com

Online Open

OnlineOpen is available to authors of primary research articles who wish to make their article available to non-subscribers on publication, or whose funding agency requires grantees to archive the final version of their article. With OnlineOpen the author, the author's funding agency, or the author's institution pays a fee to ensure that the article is made available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley InterScience, as well as deposited in the funding agency's preferred archive. For the full list of terms and conditions, see here.

Any authors wishing to publish their paper OnlineOpen are required to send a completed Online Open payment form to the Production Office upon acceptance. Prior to acceptance there is no requirement to inform the Editorial Office that you intend to publish your paper OnlineOpen. All OnlineOpen articles are treated in the same way as any other article. They go through the journal's standard peer-review process and will be accepted or rejected based on their own merit. Please send the completed and scanned Online Open payment form to roh@wiley.com.

Review Process

The journal Editors will initially assess all original submissions, including those commissioned by the editorial team. Contributions considered relevant to the aims and scope of the journal and likely to be of publishable quality will be sent out for external review. Referees will be encouraged to provide substantive, constructive reviews that provide suggestions for improving the work. The Editor-in-Chief will then make a decision about publication in the journal and authors will be notified. All manuscripts accepted for publication are subject to editing by the publisher for presentation, style and grammar. The Editor's decision is final.

Content

Review Articles: Review articles should not exceed 10,000 words, including an abstract of no more than 250 words, references, tables, and figures. The number of references is limited to 150.

Original articles: Original articles report the results of original research. Original articles should not exceed 6,500 words, including an abstract of no more than 250 words, references, tables, and figures. The number of references is limited to 80.

Editorials: Editorials should not exceed 1,500 words, references included. No figures and tables are allowed. Reviewers are encouraged to submit Editorials on important papers they have reviewed for Acta Neuropsychiatrica. Editorials presenting new hypotheses are welcome.

Letters to the Editor: Letters to the Editor should not exceed 800 words. A maximum of 1 table or figure is allowed. Letters related to articles published in Acta Neuropsychiatrica must be received within 6 months of the article's publication.

Interesting case reports should be submitted as a commentary and adopt the same structure as correspondence.

Book Forum: Books for review must be sent to: Ms K. Moss, Academic Discipline of Psychological Medicine, Level 5, Building 36, Royal North Shore Hospital, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 2065.

Manuscript Preparation

All manuscripts should be double-spaced throughout, and each section (title page, abstract, text, references, tables, figures, figure captions) should begin on a new page. Full-length research articles and brief reports should normally be divided into Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion sections.

Title page
The title page should give the following information: (1) title of the article; (2) first name(s) and surname of each author; (3) address of the department or institution to which the work should be attributed; (4) a running title - not exceeding 45 characters; (5) name, telephone, email address for the corresponding author.

Structured Abstract
Abstracts for research papers, case reports, brief reports, systematic reviews and meta-analyses should be constructed under the headings listed below. This should consist of not more than 250 words summarising the contents of the article. It is important for indexing services, that this must be intelligible independently of the article.
Objective: State the objective of the study and the main hypothesis tested in the second sentence.
Methods: Describe the basic design of the study as well as its setting, participants and key measurements or outcomes. Describe, if appropriate, the essential features of any interventions, including their method and duration of administration. For systematic reviews, list the data sources used, including time restrictions and search terms. Provide the number of studies reviewed and the selection criteria.
Results: Provide data for the key measurements in this section. Give confidence intervals for differences where appropriate or other measures of statistical significance. All data in the abstract must be reported in the text of the paper as well.
Conclusion: Briefly summarise the main findings and their clinical application. A consideration of the significance of the study and recommendations for further work should appear in the main text, not the abstract.

The Text (original articles): Full length accounts of original research. The text should include four major sections: Introduction, Material and Methods, Results and Discussion. A clear research question and a description of methods, and quality appraisal, should be provided. The Material and Methods section should be further divided into the following subheadings: Subjects, Methods, Statistical Analysis. Methods for synthesis, including meta-analysis, narrative summary, etc., should be clearly explained.

The introduction should provide an appropriate background to the article, drawing on relevant literature and explaining the research question to be addressed.

The materials and methods section should demonstrate a clear and documented design or strategy directed towards a specific research question. The study design should be appropriate to the aims of the study and be clearly described. The criteria for selecting the sample should be clearly described and justified. A clear description of sampling, recruitment to the study, data collection, and data analysis should be provided. Full details of interventions should be given for intervention studies. Procedures involving human experiments must be in accordance with the ethical standards of the Committee on Human Experimentation of the institution in which the experiments are carried out and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975. All papers reporting experiments using animals must include a statement in the Materials and Methods section providing assurance that all animals received humane care in accordance with institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals. Articles and letters to the Editor which report the results of experiments on human subjects must include a statement that informed consent was obtained after the procedure(s) had been fully explained. The authors should use metric units and the generic names of drugs throughout the manuscript. Laboratory units must be followed by SI (System International) units.

The results section should contain all the information required to assess the validity of the conclusions. The characteristics of the sample included in the study should be clearly described. Any analyses should be clear and systematic. Results of statistical tests should be reported with confidence intervals in order to provide an estimate of precision. All tables or figures must be referred to by name in the text.

A structured discussion covering but not limited to the following sections should be included; summary of main findings; the strengths and the limitations of this study; relevance to the existing literature, and the implications for future research or clinical practice.

Acknowledgments: The authors should acknowledge all support and need to disclose any involvements, financial or otherwise, that may present a conflict of interest. Grant support and acknowledgments of individuals should not exceed 150 words.

References: References should be cited in numerical order of appearance in the text and identified in-text with superscript Arabic numerals. Unpublished communications, published abstracts, and papers submitted but not yet accepted should not appear in the reference list. Manuscripts which have been accepted for publication should be cited and referenced as ¡¥in press¡¦ in place of the publication year.
References should be styled as follows:

Journal Articles
Lagopoulos J, Malhi GS, Ivanovski B, Cahill C, Lang EW, Mudaliar Y, Dorsch N, Yam A, Griffith J, & Mulvey J. Cerebrovascular autoregulation as a neuroimaging tool. Acta Neuropsychiatrica 2006; 18: 100-104.

Edited Book
Malhi GS, Lagopoulos J, Soares J, and Vieta E. Brain Imaging of Mood Disorders: Functional understanding of neuroanatomy & neural circuits. In Mood Disorders. (P Joyce and P Mitchell, Eds.). UNSW Press 2004, pp125-138.

Book
Trimble MR. The Psychosis of Epilepsy. New York, NY, Raven Press, 1991.

Tables and Figures: Tables and figures should be numbered in order of their mention in the text with Arabic numerals and should include a brief, self-explanatory, descriptive title. Tables should be double-spaced, no wider than 120 typewriter characters (including spaces).
A separate image file of each figure is required. Ensure that figures will be legible and comprehensible at final size and are of sufficiently high resolution. Permitted file formats are TIFF (.tif), JPEG (.jpg) and EPS (.eps).

Colour figures: It is the policy of Acta Neuropsychiatrica for authors to pay the full cost for the reproduction of their colour artwork. Therefore, please note that if there is colour artwork in your manuscript when it is accepted for publication, Blackwell Publishing require you to complete and return a colour work agreement form before your paper can be published. This form can be downloaded as a PDF from http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/SN_Sub2000_F_CoW.Pdf

In the event that an author is not able to cover the costs of reproducing colour figures in colour in the printed version of the journal, Acta Neuropsychiatrica offers authors the opportunity to reproduce colour figures in colour for free in the online version of the article (but they will still appear in black and white in the print version). If an author wishes to take advantage of this free colour-on-the-web service, they should liaise with the Editorial Office to ensure that the apporpriate documentation is completed for the Publisher.

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 don't need to contact the production editor to check on progress. Visit http://authorservices.wiley.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.

Free access to the final PDF offprint of your article will be available via author services only. Please therefore sign up for author services if you would like to access your article PDF offprint and enjoy the many other benefits the service offers.