Instructions for authors

Submission Guidelines for Authors

Heart Asia uses an online submission and review system (Scholar One) and manuscripts must be submitted via Scholar One http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/heartasia. You will need to register with Scholar One the first time you use the system.

BMJ Journals follows guidelines on editorial independence produced by the World Association of Medical Editors (www.wame.org/wamestmt.htm#independence), the code on good publication practice produced by the Committee on Publication Ethics (www.publicationethics.org.uk/guidelines/), and the EQUATOR network resource centre (http://www.equator-network.org/) for good research reporting.

In line with all BMJ Journals Heart Asia has stringent policies on authorship, ethics approval, patient consent, etc. These are explained in more detail on the Heart website.

Editors reserve the right to return manuscripts that do not meet these guidelines.

Authors (or their employers) retain their copyright in the article; the publishers require an exclusive licence (except for certain government employees who cannot grant this) that allows us to publish the article in Heart Asia (including any derivative products) and any other BMJ Publishing Group products, and allows us to sub-licence such rights and exploit all subsidiary rights.

We ask the corresponding author to grant this licence on behalf of all authors as shown in the Author Licence Form.Original research

Authors submitting papers reporting original data (for example, controlled trials and intervention studies) should not exceed a limit of 3000 words, four figures and/or tables, and 30 references, and should provide a structured abstract of no more than 250 words. If after removing redundancy and repetition your article exceeds these limits please consider whether you are better served by writing two separate articles, but bear in mind the need to avoid duplicate publication. Reports of randomised controlled trials should follow the revised CONSORT statement (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) published in JAMA (2001;285:1987-91) as closely as possible.

Open access/Unlocked articles

Authors are able to make their articles freely available online, immediately on publication, for a fee, using the Unlocked service. This service is available to any author publishing original research in a BMJ Journal for a fee of £1,200(+VAT)/€1,775(+VAT)/$2,220.

We remind authors that currently the journal is freely available online at no charge. Added benefits to the unlocked service are listed below:

Authors access to and use of Unlocked articles are covered by the terms and conditions of the exclusive licence agreement, which includes the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 2.0 licence and specifically prohibits commercial use of these articles. For more information please visit:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode

All readers of the article are also able to use the Unlocked article in accordance with the abovementioned Creative Commons licence. Authors participating in Unlocked are able to place the full final version of their article in the depositories of their choice. BMJ Journals will deposit all Unlocked articles in PubMed Central immediately on paper publication. The article will be flagged as unlocked on the table of contents and article content box.

Access to and use of Unlocked articles are covered by the terms and conditions of the exclusive licence agreement, which specifically prohibits commercial use of these articles. Authors participating in Unlocked are able to place the full final version of their article in the depositories of their choice. BMJ Journals will deposit all Unlocked articles in PubMed Central immediately on final publication.

If authors do not wish to pay the Unlocked fee, their article will be published in the usual way. Use of any article published in the journal, including deposition on institutional repositories, is covered by the terms and conditions of the exclusive licence agreement.

Heart Asia welcomes submissions for the following sections

• Original Research Articles
• Reviews, Viewpoints and Updates
  
  • Epidemiology
    Reviews of trends in cardiovascular disease relevant or peculiar to the Asian setting
  • Controversies on Cardiovascular Medicine
    Focusing on issues that are currently being debated and where there are opposing views.
  • Reviews in Cardiovascular Technology
    Reviews on technological developments in cardiovascular medicine and surgery.
  • Updates in Cardiovascular Medicine
    Articles focusing on a clinical condition, a diagnostic modality, therapeutic approaches or procedures.
  • Practice Viewpoints
    Articles providing practical advice relevant to current clinical practice.
  • Expert Opinion
    Articles addressing accepted practices in treatment paradigms where consensus is lacking or where there is conflicting evidence
  • Healthcare policy
    Articles on policy and guidelines relevant to the Asia Pacific region
• Images in Cardiovascular Medicine
  Images that highlight new applications of a diagnostic or therapeutic procedure, or brief case studies that highlight a clinical application or interesting presentations of a clinical condition.
• Editorials
• Letters to the Editor
• Illustrations and additional material

Articles must be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/heartasia

Original research

Authors submitting papers reporting original data (for example, controlled trials and intervention studies) should not exceed a limit of 3000 words, four figures and/or tables, and 30 references, and should provide a structured abstract of no more than 250 words. If after removing redundancy and repetition your article exceeds these limits please consider whether you are better served by writing two separate articles, but bear in mind the need to avoid duplicate publication. Reports of randomised controlled trials should follow the revised CONSORT statement (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) published in JAMA (2001;285:1987-91) as closely as possible.

Reviews, Viewpoints and Updates

Authors submitting papers for these sections should not exceed 3000 words, four figures and/or tables, and 30 references, and should provide a brief summary of no more than 250 words.

Images in Cardiovascular Medicine

Images that highlight new applications of a diagnostic or therapeutic procedure will be featured in this section as well as brief case studies showing a clinical application or interesting presentation of a clinical condition. Articles should not exceed 250 words, 2 illustrations and 2 references and there should be no more than 3 authors. Submissions that do not adhere to these strict limits will be immediately returned to the author and not enter the peer review system. AVI or MPEG files can be included as data supplements.

You need to provide proof of consent for publication from the patient(s) described in the article. We need written consent from every patient (or guardian) regardless of whether the patient can be identified from the images, preferably using the Heart Asia consent form.

Editorials

Editorials are articles in which the author expresses an opinion on an aspect of cardiovascular medicine based on published data. They should not exceed 1500 words plus 16 references.

The editors of Heart Asia commission nearly all the editorials published in the journal. Before spontaneously sending us an editorial, please first consult us about your ideas. This will avoid the disappointment of finding that we have already commissioned an article on a similar topic from someone else.

Letters to the Editor

Letters in response to articles published in Heart Asia are welcome and should be submitted electronically via the journal website. Contributors should go to the abstract or full text of the article in question. At the top right corner of each article is a "contents box". Click on the "eLetters: Submit a response to this article" link. Letters relating to or responding to previously published items in the journal will be shown to those authors, where appropriate. This is not available on the beta site.

Illustrations and additional material

Black and white images should be supplied as TIFF, GIF, EPS, PowerPoint or high quality JPEG files to a minimum of 300 dpi. Colour images should be supplied as TIFF, GIF, EPS, PowerPoint or high quality JPEG files to a minimum of 600 dpi.

Additional figures and tables, methodology, references, video clips, raw data etc, may be published online to supplement the article. If your paper exceeds the word count you should consider if any of the article could be published as a "data supplement". These files will not be copyedited or typeset.

Patient Consent Form

Please click here to download a copy of the patient consent form.

Supplements

The BMJ Publishing Group journals are willing to consider publishing supplements to regular issues. Supplement proposals may be made at the request of:

1. The journal editor, an editorial board member or a learned society may wish to organise a meeting, sponsorship may be sought and the proceedings published as a supplement.
2. The journal editor, editorial board member or learned society may wish to commission a supplement on a particular theme or topic. Again, sponsorship may be sought.
3. The BMJPG itself may have proposals for supplements where sponsorship may be necessary.
4. A sponsoring organisation, often a pharmaceutical company or a charitable foundation, that wishes to arrange a meeting, the proceedings of which will be published as a supplement.

In all cases, it is vital that the journal's integrity, independence and academic reputation is not compromised in any way.

When contacting us regarding a potential supplement, please include as much of the information below as possible.

• Journal in which you would like the supplement published
• Title of supplement and/or meeting on which it is based
• Date of meeting on which it is based
• Proposed table of contents with provisional article titles and proposed authors
• An indication of whether authors have agreed to participate
• Sponsor information including any relevant deadlines
• An indication of the expected length of each paper Guest Editor proposals if appropriate

For further information on criteria that must be fulfilled, download the supplements guidelines (PDF).

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