Joint Health Command

ADF Health Journal

Instructions for authors

ADF Health welcomes contributions (including letters to the Editor) on all aspects of military medicine and the health of ADF personnel. Manuscripts must be offered exclusively to ADF Health, unless clearly authenticated copyright exemption accompanies the manuscript. All manuscripts will be subject to peer review, with feedback to the authors. Accepted contributions will be subject to editing.

Contributions should be sent to: Production Editor, ADF Health, Locked Bag 3030, Strawberry Hills NSW 2012. Fax +61 02 9562 6699. Phone +61 02 9562 6666. E-mail: adfh@ampco.com.au

Requirements for manuscripts

Two printed copies of the manuscript should be submitted along with an electronic copy on disk or sent by email. The printed copies should be double-spaced on one side of the paper only, on A4 paper. One copy (for the reviewers) should be without authors' names, affiliations or acknowledgements.

On the title page, please give for each author: full name, including middle initial; relevant qualifications, military rank and postnominals; position and institutional address at the time the article was produced. Identify one author as correspondent and give his/her postal address, direct telephone and facsimile numbers and email address. Include a word count for the main body of the text (not references, tables or figures).

Include an abstract of the article (200-250 words).

Research reports should be subdivided into Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion and References. All pages should be numbered. No text should be underlined.

Measurements are to be in SI units (mmHg is acceptable for blood pressure measurements) and normal ranges should be included. Micrographs should include a scale marker and a note of the original magnification used.

Tables should be double spaced on separate sheets of paper. No vertical or horizontal rules are to be used.

Photographs should be glossy black-and-white or colour. Slides should be converted to photographs before being sent. ADF Health is printed in colour and authors are encouraged to find suitable illustrations for their articles.

Electronic copies may be in Mac or PC wordprocessor format.

Electronic images must be in saved at high resolution (300 dots per inch when the image is at the size intended for printing). Illustrations should not be embedded in the wordprocessor document, only their position indicated. Illustrations should be saved as separate documents in TIFF or EPS format.

All patients shown in images must be deidentified before submission, and authors must certify that this has been done before publication.

Abbreviations do not mean the same thing to all readers. To avoid confusion they should only be used after they have appeared in brackets after the complete expression - eg, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can thereafter be referred to as PTSD.

The preferred length for articles is 3000 words or less. Inclusion of more than five authors requires justification.

Letters to the Editor should not exceed 400 words (including references, which should be limited to 5 per letter).

References should be presented in the "Vancouver" style (see Medical Journal of Australia 1991; 155: 197-202, or www.mja.com.au/public/information/uniform.html). In this system references appear in the text as superscript numbers (eg,1,2). The references are numbered in the order of their appearance in the text. Index Medicus abbreviations for journal titles are to be used. Examples of the format for quoting journals and books are given below.

1. Buckley PTR. The Defence Health Service - the formative steps. ADF Health 1999; 1: 4-7.

2. Heath D, Williams DR. Man at high altitude, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1981: 56-65.

Consent: Any report of experimental investigation on human subjects must contain evidence of informed consent by the subjects and of approval by the relevant institutional ethics committee.

Permission to reprint articles will be granted by the Editor, subject to the author's agreement, provided that an acknowledgment giving the original date of publication in ADF Health is printed with the article.

Authors who submit articles for publication in ADF Health are now asked to make a conflict of interest statement with their submission. A “competing interests” statement based on this is published with every article.

The purpose of the conflict of interest statement is to ensure that any factors — personal relationships, financial connections, sponsorships — that might bias the author of an article are declared so that readers are aware of the potential conflict of interest and can include that knowledge in assessing the information presented to them.

To prevent ambiguity, authors must state explicitly whether potential conflicts do or do not exist. Stating a conflict of interest does not disqualify an author from publication.

For more information about conflict of interest and how it is managed by ADF Health and other medical journals, see the Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals, published by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (available at http://www.icmje.org/index.html#conflict).