Submission guidelines

General Guidelines

• It is best to use Adobe Photoshop to create and save images, and Adobe Illustrator for line art and labels.
• Do not submit art created in Microsoft Excel, Word, or PowerPoint. These files cannot be used by the typesetter.
• Save each figure in a separate file.
• Do not compress files.
• All black-and-white and color artwork should be at a resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch) in TIFF format. Line art should be 1,200 dpi in EPS or TIFF format. Contact the Production Editor at EGO if you are unsure of the final size.
• It is preferable for figures to be cropped to their final size (approximately 3½ inches for a single column and up to 7 inches for a double column), or larger, and in the correct orientation. If art is submitted smaller and then has to be enlarged, its resolution (dpi) and clarity will decrease.

  Note: Lower resolutions (less than 300 dpi) and JPEG format (.jpg extension) for grayscale and color artwork are strongly discouraged due to the poor quality they yield in printing, which requires 300 dpi resolution for sharp, clear, detailed images. JPEG format, by definition, is a lower resolution (compressed) format designed for quick upload on computer screens.

Black-and-White Art

• Black-and-white artwork can be halftone (or grayscale) photographs, radiographs, drawings, line art, graphs, and flowcharts. EGO will only accept digital artwork.
• If possible, do not send color art for conversion to black-and-white. Do the conversion yourself so that you can check the results and confirm in advance that no critical details are lost or obscured by the change to black-and-white.
• For best results, line art should be black on a white background. Lines and type should be clean and evenly dark. Avoid screens or cross-hatching, as they can darken or be uneven in printing and lead to unacceptable printing quality.

Color Art

• All color artwork should be saved in CMYK, not RGB.

Art Labels

• Arrows, asterisks, and arrowheads (or other markers) should be white in dark or black areas and black in light or white areas, and large in size. If not, these highlighting marks may become difficult to see when figures are reduced in size during the typesetting process.
• Use 1-point (or thicker) rules and leader lines.
• Capitalize the first word of each label and all proper nouns. Consider using all capitals if you need a higher level of labels.
• Where there are alternate terms or spellings for a named structure, use the most common one and make sure it is consistent with what is used in the text.
• Avoid using multiple fonts and font sizes for the labels; use only one or two sizes of a serif font.

Article Processing Charge (APC)

(Valid from 2021, until then the publication will be free of charge) 

During the submission process, you will be prompted to confirm that you accept to pay the APC if your manuscript should be chosen for publication. Please refer to the first page of this document for the exact pricing. You will be billed based on the year in which you submitted your manuscript, but you will not receive the bill until and unless your manuscript has been accepted for publication.

 

Submission Procedure

• Consult the checklist to ensure that you are ready to submit your manuscript
• Manuscripts must be submitted electronically here 
• Always review your manuscript before submitting it. You may stop a submission at any phase and save it to submit later. After submission, you will receive a confirmation email. You can also check the status of your manuscript by logging in to the submission system. The Editor in Chief will inform you via email once a decision has been made.

Revision Procedure

• Should the editors decide that your article requires a revision, you will need to make the changes via a word-processing program and resubmit it electronically.
• Log In to the submission system and find your article, which will be marked for revision.
• The best way to make revisions to your manuscript is by enabling the Track Changes mode in Microsoft Word, which will automatically highlight and mark up revised text. Please submit both a marked up copy and a clean copy of your revised manuscript to the submission system.
• Your original files will still be available after you upload your revised manuscript, so you should delete any redundant files before completing the submission.
• You will also be provided space in which to respond to the reviewers’ and editors’ comments. Please be as specific as possible in your response.

Page Proofs

Page proofs will be sent to you via email. The proofs will be in a PDF file format, which should be opened using Acrobat Reader software. You will receive further instructions with your proofs. Take this opportunity to check the typeset text for typographic and related errors. Elective alterations are difficult to accommodate owing to the associated time and expense of introducing them. Therefore, please be sure that when you submit your manuscript, it is accurate, complete, and final.

Statement on Liability

The legislation on product liability makes increased demands on the duty of care to be exercised by authors of scientific research and medical publications. This applies in particular to papers and publications containing therapeutic directions or instructions and doses or dosage schedules. We therefore request you to examine with particular care, also in your own interest, the factual correctness of the contents of your manuscript once it has been copyedited and returned to you in the form of galley proofs. The responsibility for the correctness of data and statements made in the manuscript rests entirely with the author.

Definition of Authorship

Authorship credit should be based on criteria established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Each author should have made the following contributions towards the completion of the manuscript:

1. Substantial contributions to conception and design, 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 published

Copyright Statement

Submitted manuscripts must represent original research not previously published nor being considered for publication elsewhere. The editors combat plagiarism, double publication, and scientific misconduct. 

Your manuscript may be subject to an investigation and retraction if plagiarism is suspected. 

If you plan to reproduce text, tables, or figures from a published source, you must first obtain written permission from the copyright holder (usually the publisher). This is required even if the material is from your own published work. For material never before published and given to you by another person, you must obtain permission from that person. Serious delays to publication can be incurred if permissions are not obtained. 

As the author, it is your responsibility to obtain all permissions, pay any permission fees, furnish copies of permissions to EGO with your manuscript, and include a credit line at the end of the figure caption, beneath the table, or in a text footnote. 

Upon publication of an article, all rights are held by the publishers, including the rights to reproduce all or part of any publication. The reproduction of articles or illustrations without prior consent from the publisher is prohibited. 

Statement of Ethics

This journal adheres to the ethical standards described by the Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Authors are expected to adhere to these standards. 

For all manuscripts reporting data from studies involving human or animal participants, formal review and approval, or formal review and waiver (exemption), by an appropriate institutional review board (IRB) or ethics committee is required, as well as any necessary HIPAA consent, and 12 should be described in the Methods section with the full name of the reviewing entity. All clinical trials must be registered in a public trials registry. Denote the registry and registry number.  

Patient Permission Policy

You must obtain a signed patient permission form for every patient whose recognizable photograph or video will be used. If you do not supply this, the identity of the patient must be obscured before the image is published; this could interfere with the instructive value of the photograph or video. 

Conflict of Interest Statement

The importance of transparency and objectivity in scientific research and the peer review process.

The conflict of interest exists when an investigator, author, editor, or reviewer has a financial/personal interest or belief that could affect his/her objectivity, or inappropriately influence his/her actions. 

All manuscripts for original articles, systematic reviews, meta-analysis, short reviews, case reports, editorials, statements and position papers that are submitted to EGO as well as the articles that are published in it, must be accompanied by a conflict of interest disclosure statement or a declaration by the authors that they do not have any conflicts of interest to declare. 

EGO may use disclosures as a basis for editorial decisions and may publish them if they are believed to be important to readers in judging the manuscript. Likewise, it may decide not to publish on the basis of the declared conflict. 

All the “potential conflicts of interests” that are to be privately disclosed to the editors of EGO when submitting a manuscript, include all financial and non-financial interests and relationships, direct employment with a private sector entity and service on private sector and non-profit Boards and advisory panels, whether paid or unpaid. 

Authors should also disclose any conflict of interest that may have influenced either the conduct or the presentation of the research to the editors, including but not limited to close relationships with those who might be helped or hurt by the publication, academic interests and rivalries, and any personal, religious or political convictions relevant to the topic at hand. 

In the article, the authors must include a statement that discloses all relevant conflicts of interest and affiliations. The relevance of financial conflicts of interest with private firms is defined as a relationship of any value with a firm that has a stake in the subject of the manuscript or its competitors. Relevance for patents is defined as any invention or pending invention connected in any way to the subject. As relevance is often in the eye of the beholder, one must err on the side of full disclosure when drafting the disclosure statement. Editors will check a draft against the private financial disclosure statement and initiate discussions toward possible adjustments, if necessary. 

What to report: Any financial relationship from the past three years (dating from the month of submission) of any size, should be disclosed. These potential conflicts of interest include:

• Direct employment
• Grants and research funding (but not grants to your institution or others within your institution, on which you have not worked). These include substantial grants from trade associations and non-profit (50% or more) or funded by private sector firms
• Consultancies
• Travel grants, speaking fees and other honoraria
• Paid expert testimony for one side in adversarial proceeding (this does not include testimony as a factual witness in a civil or criminal case)
• Patents granted and pending applications, irrespective of whether they are generating royalties or not
• Stock ownership and investment in the related ‘sector’ funds or stock options, including those of immediate family members, but excluding diversified mutual funds and investment trusts Membership of private sector, scientific or other advisory Boards, whether paid or unpaid

In addition, any current negotiations regarding future employment or current job offers, either full-or part-time, must be disclosed. 
In disclosing these financial arrangements to the editors, the authors can include dollar amounts, albeit they will not be printed in the journal. Editors may choose to exclude this information from the publication, but in no case should an editor or author consider an arrangement irrelevant based on its size alone. 

Non-Financial Conflicts of Interest:

The authors must consider disclosing these views and the editors may choose to print any affiliations or expressions from these views that may be relevant. These may be personal, political or intellectual, and may include any expression of strongly held views relevant to the subject of submission. Such disclosures may be original or they may be references to opinions previously expressed in books or monographs, opposite editorials (op-eds) or public comments, or to some prior sworn testimony or lobbying of legislators or legislative bodies. Disclosable non-financial conflicts of interest will also include membership or affiliation to nongovernmental organizations that have an interest in the submission.

 

How do I Make a Declaration?

The declaration must be included at the end of your manuscript, following any acknowledgments and prior to the references, under the heading ‘Conflict of Interest Statement’. If no declaration is made, the following will be printed under this heading in your article: ‘None Declared’.
Alternatively, you may wish to state that ‘The author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest.

 

Please download, complete the Statement of Consent and submit it online with your manuscript or return it to the publisher via email (see Author Instructions – Editorial Contacts).