Instructions for authors

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

Articles must be submitted online at http://submit-heartasia.bmj.com

Submission Guidelines for Authors

Heart Asia uses an online submission and review system (Bench>Press) and manuscripts must be submitted via Bench>Press http://submit-heartasia.bmj.com. You will need to register with Bench>Press 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.

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.

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