Guide for Authors

Please note, with immediate effect, The Surgeon will no longer accept case reports or "How I Do It" papers. Any such items submitted will be returned to the authors.

Editorial policy
Failure to submit a paper in accordance with these instructions may result in a delay in processing of a manuscript and its subsequent publication. The Editorial Board does not necessarily agree with the views expressed in articles published in The Surgeon. Authors submitting manuscripts do not have to be Fellows of either College and The Surgeon welcomes submissions from authors of diverse clinical and scientific interests and expertise, provided the article has relevance (current or projected) to the science and practice of surgery, in its widest sense.

A manuscript is considered for publication in The Surgeon, Journal of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and Ireland, on the understanding that it has not been submitted simultaneously to another journal, has not been accepted for publication elsewhere, and has not already been published. On acceptance a manuscript becomes the copyright of the Colleges. Manuscripts are subject to peer review but the Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to make the final decision regarding publication and to make literary amendments where considered necessary. We aim to reach a decision on submitted articles within eight weeks. Rejected manuscripts will not be returned. The Surgeon employs a double-blind peer-review process (authors and reviewers remain anonymous to each other throughout).

The Surgeon has agreed to abide by the ICMJE's 'Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals' (see www.icmje.org).

The following paper types are published:
• Editorials
• Original articles
• Reviews
• Audit
• Matter for debate
• Correspondence: surgical technique (for details, see section at the end of this Guide)
• Correspondence: Letters to the editor
• Book reviews
• Case reports and 'How I Do It' papers are no longer accepted.

Online submission of articles
Submission and peer review of all papers is now conducted entirely online, increasing efficiency for editors, authors, and reviewers, and enhancing publication speed. Authors requesting further information on online submission are strongly encouraged to view the system, including a tutorial, at http://ees.elsevier.com/surge.

A comprehensive Author Support service is also available to answer additional enquiries: authorsupport@elsevier.com.

The contact details for the journal's editorial office are as follows:

Ms Suzanne Peedell
Administrative Editor, The Surgeon
Health Sciences, Elsevier Ltd
The Boulevard, Langford Lane
Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 1865 843282
Fax: +44 (0) 1865 843992
Email: thesurgeon@elsevier.com Online submission: http://ees.elsevier.com/surge

Authorship
All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following:
1. the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data
2. drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content
3. final approval of the version to be submitted.

A covering letter signed by all authors must accompany submissions, stating that all authors have seen and approved the manuscript and are fully conversant with its contents. Authors must disclose in the covering letter any potential or actual personal, financial or political interest they may have in the material. It should be disclosed if an abstract of the work has previously been published or if any papers using the same dataset or relating to the same topic have been published or submitted by any of the authors for consideration elsewhere. Results of multi-centre studies should be reported under the name of the organising study group.

Acknowledgements
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship as defined above should be listed in an acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support. Authors should disclose whether they had any writing assistance and identify the entity that paid for this assistance.

Conflict of interest statement
The potential for conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author's institution), reviewer or editor has financial or personal relationships that may inappropriately influence his or her actions. Editors and reviewers for the journal are responsible for disclosing to the Editor-in-Chief any personal or financial relationship that may bias their work during the peer review process. Corresponding authors are required to submit a conflict of interest statement as a separate submission item. Where an author has no competing interests, they must nonetheless provide a statement to confirm this. The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to publish all declared competing interests.

Authors are specifically asked to reflect on financial conflicts of interest (such as employment, consultancy, stock ownership, honoraria and paid expert testimony) as well as other forms of conflict of interest, including personal, academic and intellectual issues. Authors will not be able to complete their submission without providing a conflict of interest statement. For queries, please email the journal editorial office: thesurgeon@elsevier.com.

Role of the funding source
All sources of funding should be declared as an acknowledgement at the end of the text. Authors should declare the role of study sponsors, if any, in the study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; and in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. If the study sponsors had no such involvement, the authors should so state.

Randomised controlled trials
All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in The Surgeon should include a completed Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) flow chart. Please refer to the CONSORT statement website at http://www.consort-statement.org for more information. The Surgeon has adopted the proposal from the ICMJE which require, as a condition of consideration for publication of clinical trials, registration in a public trials registry. Trials must register at or before the onset of patient enrolment. The clinical trial registration number (ISRCTN) should be included at the end of the abstract of the article. For this purpose, a clinical trial is defined as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Studies designed for other purposes, such as to study pharmacokinetics or major toxicity (e.g. phase I trials) would be exempt. Further information can be found at http://www.icmje.org.

Ethics
Work on human beings that is submitted to the The Surgeon should comply with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki. The manuscript should contain a statement that the work has been approved by the appropriate ethical committees related to the institution(s) in which it was performed and that subjects gave informed consent to the work.

Animal experiments require full compliance with local, national, ethical, and regulatory principles, and local licensing arrangements, and the journal will not accept papers for publication if doubts exist over the standards of care and humanity shown to experimental animals. For this reason a clear statement of the care principles used should be included in the text.

Guidelines on publication ethics adhered to by this journal are to be found at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) website at http://www.publicationethics.org.

Patient confidentiality
Patients have a right to privacy. Therefore identifying information, including patients' images, names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be included in videos, recordings, written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and you have obtained written informed consent for publication in print and electronic form from the patient (or parent, guardian or next of kin where applicable). If such consent is made subject to any conditions, the Editor and Publisher must be made aware of all such conditions. Written consents must be provided on request.

Even where consent has been given, identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note.

If such consent has not been obtained, personal details of patients included in any part of the paper and in any supplementary materials (including all illustrations and videos) must be removed before submission.

Copyright
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder. Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to sign a `Journal Publishing Agreement' (for more information on this and copyright see http://www.elsevier.com/copyright).

If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases: please consult www.elsevier.com/permissions.

Subscribers may reproduce tables of contents or prepare lists of articles including abstracts for internal circulation within their institutions. Permission of the Publisher is required for resale or distribution outside the institution and for all other derivative works, including compilations and translations (please consult www.elsevier.com/permissions).

Funding body agreements and policies
Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with potential manuscript archiving requirements as specified as conditions of their grant awards. To learn more about existing agreements and policies please visit http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbodies.

Proofs
One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author, which they are requested to correct and return within 48 hours. Elsevier now sends PDF proofs that can be annotated; for this you will need to download Adobe Reader version 7 available free from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. Instructions on how to annotate PDF files will accompany the proofs. The exact system requirements are given at the Adobe website: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrsystemreqs.html#70win. If you do not wish to use the PDF annotations function, you may list the corrections (including replies to the Query Form) in an e-mail. Please list your corrections quoting line number. If, for any reason, this is not possible, then mark the corrections and any other comments (including replies to the Query Form) on a printout of your proof and return by fax, or scan the pages and e-mail, or by post.

Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor-in-Chief. We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication: please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility. Note that the publisher may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.

Offprints
The corresponding author will, at no cost, be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail. The PDF file is a watermarked version of the published article and includes a cover sheet with the journal cover image and a disclaimer outlining the terms and conditions of use. Additional paper offprints can be ordered by the authors. An order form with prices will be sent to the corresponding author.

In addition, corresponding authors who are not Members or Fellows of either College will receive a printed copy of the issue in which their paper appears.

Language editing
The responsibility to provide a paper written in a reasonable standard of English, and structured in adherence to the Guide for Authors, lies with the author. Editors and reviewers are not responsible for making language corrections. Well-structured papers with correct language usage help ensure that the peer review process runs smoothly by allowing editors and reviewers to focus on scientific merit, and could result in the faster publication of research. Poor language quality - including errors in grammar, spelling or language usage- could delay publication or lead to outright rejection of the paper.

Authors - especially those whose first language is not English - requiring information about language editing and copyediting services pre- and post-submission should visit www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/languageediting or contact authorsupport@elsevier.com for more information.

Elsevier has negotiated with eight language editing companies to provide language editing services to our authors at competitive rates - please see www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorshome.authors/languagepolishing. Please note Elsevier neither endorses nor takes responsibility for any products, goods or services offered by outside vendors through our services or in any advertising. For more information please refer to our Terms & Conditions www.elsevier.com/wps/find/termsconditions.cws_home/termsconditions.

Presentation of manuscripts
All manuscripts must be submitted as follows:• Text should be in 12pt font size, double spaced
• Tables, references and legends should be placed at the end of the text file
• Illustrations and equations should be in separate files.
• Submit all photographs in colour whenever possible
If submitting artwork in electronic files please provide standard TIFF or EPS formats. Photographic images must be submitted in non-compressed files with minimum 300-dpi resolution. Place each illustration in a separate file. Authors are encouraged to submit multimedia material for inclusion in the electronic version of the Journal. Include moving images, sound and hypertext links where appropriate

Manuscripts
Each of the following sections should begin on a new page:• Title page
• Abstract
• Text
• Acknowledgement(s)
• References
• Tables
• Legends for illustrations.
The title page should give the following information:
• Title of the article
• Names and initials of each author
• Department and institution to which the work should be attributed
• Name, address, telephone and fax number, and e-mail address of the author responsible for correspondence
• Sources of financial support
• Type of article being submitted (review paper, original article etc.)
• Keywords (words appearing as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in the supplement to the Medicus may be used as key words)
• A short title

To ensure anonymity during the peer review process, please ensure that the authors' names and contact details appear only on the title page and are not used to identify any of the files submitted.

Abstract: The second page of the manuscript should carry an abstract of no more than 250 words. It should include the four following sections:
• The background and purpose of the study
• Methods used, including a description of the subjects, research materials, and analytical methodology
• The main findings, with specific data and their statistical significance wherever possible
• Conclusions.

Text: A suggested outline would be
• Introduction
• Methods and materials
• Results
• Discussion, which should be concise and not digress from the direct results • Conclusion.
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) should be clearly identified as such. Text should be gender-neutral.

Tables and illustrations
Ensure that all units of measurement are included and that all tables are cited in the text. If a table or illustration has been reproduced from a published work the source must be given in full, written permission having been granted by the author and by the publisher.

For information on the preparation of electronic artwork, please see http://www.elsevier.com/artworkinstructions. To help authors submit high-quality artwork early in the process, the Artwork Quality Control Tool automatically checks the submitted artwork and other file types when they are first uploaded against the artwork requirements outlined in the Artwork Instructions to Authors.

General points:
• Use uniform lettering and sizing of your original artwork.
• Save text in illustrations as 'graphics' or enclose the font.
• Only use the following fonts: Arial, Courier, Helvetica, Times, Symbol.
• Number the illustrations according to their sequence in the text.
• Use a logical naming convention for your artwork files, and supply a separate listing of the files and the software used.
• Provide all illustrations as separate files.
• Provide captions to illustrations separately
• Produce images near to the desired size of the printed version.

References
All types of articles, except review articles, should have a maximum of 20 references.The accuracy of references is the responsibility of the author and articles found to contain inaccuracies in references will be returned. Authors must not cite references to works they have not read without explicitly stating that their information derives from a secondary source. Authors must also ensure that the material is quoted with the approval of the originator. References, numbered in the order in which they are mentioned in the text, should be listed on a separate page. Journal abbreviations should be as listed in Index Medicus (see www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/lji.html).

References to journal articles should give:
• name(s) of author(s)
• title of paper
• title of journal
• date
• volume number
• page numbers
For example:
Soter NA, Wasserman SI, Austen KF. Cold urticaria: release into the circulation of histamine and eosinophil chemotactic factor of anaphylaxis during cold challenge. N Engl J Med 1976; 78: 687-90

References to books/monographs should give:
• name(s) of author(s)
• chapter title
• editors
• title of book
• place of publication
• publisher's name
• date
• page numbers
For example: Rhodes AJ, Van Rooyen CE. Textbook of Virology; for Students and Practitioners of Medicine and the other Health Sciences 5th edn. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1968: 125-40. Reference to unpublished material is not recommended.

Statistics and units of measurement
Decimal points, not commas, should be used. All measurements should be expressed in SI (Système Internationale) units. Numerical data should be analysed by appropriate statistical methods and these should be stated clearly in the methodology section of the text. Authors are required to ensure the validity of any statistical data presented as a significant component of a submitted article. The Surgeon encourages authors to refer to Br J Surg 1991;78:782-4 for guidance on the presentation of statistics.

Reviews
The Surgeon usually solicits reviews relating to the scientific basis and clinical practice of surgery in general, as well as subspecialty areas of surgery. The Editorial Board, however, will consider unsolicited articles, and will publish these after the appropriate refereeing process, provided they are an up-to-date, critical, comprehensive and well-referenced review. Reviews with a strong educational emphasis are encouraged.

Surgical techniques
It is the policy of The Surgeon to be very selective in the acceptance of surgical techniques, although the Editor-in-Chief welcomes the submission of these on topics of significant clinical relevance, important educational content and interest to journal readers. These articles should be submitted as "Correspondence" and consist of: (1) a sentence or two of introduction (2) key words; (3) the main body of the text and discussion written as correspondence; (4) a conclusion; (5) five references or less. Images should be included with clear legends. The length should be between 500 and 1000 words. The Editorial Board reserves the right to publish any accepted surgical techniques online-only.

PLEASE NOTE: The journal no longer accepts case reports or "How I Do It" articles; authors may wish to consider submitting case reports to a new online-only, author-pays journal, International Journal of Surgery Case Reports ( www.casereports.com).