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Author Guidelines
- To submit a manuscript, create a user account at this site (if you are already a JMIR user, use that username/password!), and login at http://www.researchprotocols.org/author. You may have to create a role as "author" first.
- If you have an existing grant proposal or research protocol, we make it easy for you: We don't want authors having to spend a lot of time reformatting it, that's why our instructions are short and flexible. Just upload your existing word document for the initial peer-review. We do ask to shorten very long protocols to approximately 20 manuscript pages (plus tables and figures) - additional information can be moved to Multimedia Appendices. Ideally, add some top-level headings (IMRD, see below) to structure it more like a journal article (e.g., remove sections which describe the investigators and research environment, if this was required for a grant proposal).
- The preferred article structure is Introduction - Methods - Results - Discussion ("results" for protocols can be a very brief summary of progress to date, recruitment/enrolment status, timeline, when are results expected, screenshots of an application or flow diagrams etc), but we realize that for protocols and proposals the format may be different.
- In-text citation must be numeric like this [1] and references must be in a section "References" at the end of the article - see Instructions for Authors: References. They do not have to be reformatted to a specific format (although the preferred style is AMA, like for JAMA), but we recommend to add the Pubmed-Identifier in the form "PMID:22209829" at the end of each reference or a link to the Pubmed record (the URL contains the PMID, e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22209829) - during production, our refcheck software will then reformat them automatically, and also reorder them if they are not cited in order of appearance.
- If you write a clinical trials protocol from the scratch we strongly recommend to adhere to the SPIRIT Guidelines for a list of items to address in a clinical trials protocol
- Although most of the protocols we currently publish are "dry lab" research, we also publish "wet lab" protocols of methods in biochemistry, genomics etc.
- Early reports, formative research articles (e.g. describing the development of an intervention), methods articles, articles describing recruitment and engagement etc all have the format IMRD, although in some instances the "Results" section may be very short.
- In Step 4, upload any existing peer-review reports as Multimedia Appendix or supplementary file, if available. In your cover "letter" (note for editor), comment on whether the research is ongoing, has been funded or peer-reviewed in your cover letter. ONLY IF PREVIOUS REVIEWS ARE AVAILABLE YOU ARE ELIGIBLE FOR A ARTICLE PROCESSING FEE DISCOUNT, AND IT WILL SPEED UP THE PUBLICATION PROCESS, AS WE MAY NOT HAVE TO SEND IT OUT FOR EXTERNAL PEER-REVIEW.
Submission Preparation Checklist
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
Paper adheres to JMIR Instructions for Authors
To be eligible for the discounted ($950) Article Processing Fee: If this is a already reviewed GRANT-FUNDED grant proposal or protocol, authors select an "article section" with the word "(funded)" in it AND upload the existing peer-review reports (e.g. from the funding agency) as publishable Multimedia Appendix. It may be necessary to explain if the submitted proposal/protocol already took into account reviewer comments.
If a proposal/protocol has not been funded OR if no peer-review reports are available/publishable, the paper will undergo external peer-review, and authors agree to pay the full APF ($1900) on acceptance. Early results, formative evaluations etc. are also in this category.
Copyright Notice
Unless stated otherwise, all articles are open-access distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work ("first published in JMIR Research Protocols...") is properly cited with original URL and bibliographic citation information. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.researchprotocols.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
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