EPIDEMIOLOGY
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EPIDEMIOLOGY publishes original research from all fields of epidemiology. The journal also welcomes descriptions of new methods, commentaries, review articles, and meta-analyses.

EPIDEMIOLOGY publishes about 15% of all submitted manuscripts. The editors decline about two-thirds of submissions within a week of receipt; corresponding authors are notified promptly by e-mail. The rest are sent for double-blind peer review. Average time to first decision for reviewed manuscripts is 37 days, with 90% receiving a first decision within eight weeks. Expedited review and publication is possible for time-sensitive papers.

We do not consider pre-submission inquiries, because we can best evaluate your paper when we see the entire manuscript (see editorial).

Published papers are eligible for the annual Rothman EPIDEMIOLOGY Prize, which includes an award of $5000.

Word counts for comparison to limits should include all text to appear in print except the title page information, abstract, bibliography, tables, and figures.

Original Research Articles (1500 to 4000 words): Research articles should begin with a short introduction (background and reason for undertaking the work), followed by Methods, Results, and Discussion. Authors may wish to consult STROBE for guidance on the presentation of original epidemiologic research (see editorial). Papers on methodology are not required to follow this structure. EPIDEMIOLOGY welcomes papers that present precisely measured persuasively null results for which either prior data or a compelling rationale exists for a non-null effect (see editorial).

Brief Reports (up to 1500 words): We encourage brief reports of research results or methodological developments that can be presented succinctly. Brief reports should follow the content and structure of original research articles.

Validation Studies (2000 words):  Validation studies should follow the outline for an Original Research Article and should provide estimates to inform bias analyses or otherwise be of use in epidemiologic research (see editorial). Examples include estimates of measurement error for continuous variables, classification parameters for discrete variables (sensitivity, specificity, or positive and negative predictive values), strengths of association to inform analyses of an unmeasured confounder, or participation proportions within combinations of exposures and outcomes. The validation study should be designed and the results presented to optimize their utility in other similar settings.

Review Articles and Meta-analyses (up to 5000 words): We welcome review articles and meta-analyses. These should be written for a general epidemiologic audience. Authors may wish to consult PRISMA or other published guidelines for the conduct and presentation of meta-analyses.

Commentaries (up to 2000 words): Commentaries may address any topic of interest to the epidemiologic community, including the implications of specific findings for public health policy or descriptions of novel hypotheses with strong plausibility. The editors occasionally invite commentaries on selected papers without consulting the authors; authors who wish to respond are free to do so through a letter to the editor.

Letters (up to 400 words, 4 references): Letters allow authors to submit critical responses to published papers. Letters are published only online, but will be listed in the corresponding issue's table of contents and indexed in PubMed.

Research Letters (up to 600 words, 1 table or figure, 8 references): Research letters allow authors to present original data in a succinct format. Like Original Research Articles or Brief Reports, these manuscripts are subject to peer review. Letters are published only online, where they are available for free. They will be listed in the table of contents of an issue and indexed in PubMed.

Book or Software Reviews (up to 800 words): Authors interested in submitting a review of a recent book or new software should consult the Editor-in-Chief.

Remembrances (up to 400 words, with photograph): The journal publishes brief memorials in honor of recently deceased epidemiologists. These should be signed, without references, and include a distilled combination of essential information (full name, dates of birth and death, main institutional affiliations and accomplishments) and personal memories (see an example).

Essential Conditions

Author Responsibility: All submitted manuscripts must be original contributions, not previously published (except as an abstract) and not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Authors must include any closely related manuscripts (published, in press, or under review) as part of the online submission. Results from related manuscripts should be discussed in the submitted manuscript, providing readers with a synthesis of findings (see editorial).

If any part of a manuscript is copied directly from another paper (even a paper by the same authors), set that text in quotation marks and provide the reference (including the page number of the quotation). The Editorial Office checks manuscripts for duplication with published papers.

Each author must qualify for authorship per the criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

Conflicts of interest: Authors must state all possible conflicts of interest on the title page, including financial, consultant, institutional and other relationships that might lead to bias or a conflict of interest. If there is no conflict of interest, this should also be explicitly stated as "none declared." All relevant conflicts of interest should be included on the title page of the manuscript with the heading "Conflicts of Interest." They should also be reported on the Copyright Transfer form (see below), which includes a section on the disclosure of potential conflicts of interest based on the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals" (www.icmje.org/update.html).

Sources of funding: All relevant sources of funding should be included on the title page of the manuscript with the heading "Source of Funding." If the result reported in the submission corresponds directly to the specific aims of a source (or sources) of funding, then that source of funding should be described as follows: "The results reported herein correspond to specific aims of grant XXX to investigator YYY from ZZZ", where XXX is a grant number, YYY is the Principal Investigator of the grant, and ZZZ is the funding agency. All other sources of support should be described as follows: "This work was (also) supported by grant(s) XXX from ZZZ", where "also" is inserted only if the listed support is in addition to support corresponding directly to a specific aim, XXX is a grant number, and ZZZ is a funding agency. Additional sources of support should be added serially (e.g., grants XXX1 from ZZZ1, XXX2 from ZZZ2, and XXX3 from ZZZ3. In all cases, grant numbers should be provided in a format that allows interested parties to find the grant in publicly available databases provided by many funding agencies.

Copyright Transfer: Before a paper can be published, each author must complete and submit the Author Responsibility, Disclosure, and Copyright Transfer form, also referred to simply as the Copyright Transfer form. The Copyright Transfer Form is completed within Editorial Manager by the corresponding author during the Additional Information submission step. The corresponding author should add co-authors during the Add/Edit/Remove Authors submission step. Upon resubmission, the co-authors of the submission will be emailed a hyperlink to verify their co-authorship and to complete the Copyright Transfer Form within Editorial Manager. Because 80% of submissions are rejected without review, we only ask for Copyright Transfer Forms from co-authors upon resubmission.

Once a manuscript is accepted, it cannot be published elsewhere in similar form, in whole or in part, in any language, without permission from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Authors can request this permission by clicking on “Permissions Requests” at the top of this Web page. Alternatively, authors can opt for Open Access (see below).

Research Ethics and Informed Consent: It is the authors' responsibility to verify that any study involving human subjects has been approved by the committee on research ethics at the institution where the research was conducted, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Association. State in the manuscript that such approval was received and, where applicable, that study participants gave informed consent.

Permissions: The use of direct quotations, tables, or illustrations published elsewhere requires written permission from the copyright owner (usually the original publisher) provided to an author, along with full details about the source. Any permissions fees that might be required by the copyright owner are the responsibility of the authors.

Compliance with Research Funding Agency Accessibility Requirements: Several funding agencies request or require authors to submit the post-print version of their article (the version after peer review and acceptance, but not the final published article) to a repository that is accessible online without charge. As a service to our authors, the publisher will notify the National Library of Medicine about articles that require deposit, and will transmit to PubMed Central the post-print version of articles funded in whole or in part by the National Institutes of Health, Research Councils UK and/or Wellcome Trust (see the Open Access section), or the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Authors must provide this funding information on the Copyright Transfer form to initiate this process. LWW will not be held responsible for retroactive deposits to PubMed Central if the author has not recorded this funding source on the Copyright Transfer form.

Manuscript Submission

We provide a Web-based manuscript system for online submission of manuscripts (Editorial Manager). You can follow your paper's progress through the editorial process on the Web site. If you have any problems, contact Epidemiology (e-mail: timothy.lash@epidemiology-journal.com).

Manuscript Preparation

Cover Letter: Although the cover letter should not repeat the main points of the abstract, authors are encouraged to state what they believe to be the main contribution of their paper and the main reasons they have elected to submit the paper for consideration by EPIDEMIOLOGY. The cover letter must state that the paper and the data have not previously been published, either in whole or in part (unless as an abstract), and that no similar paper is in press or under review elsewhere. The cover letter must also state potential conflicts of interest, or state that there is no conflict of interest. The cover letter must list closely related papers by any of the authors that are included with the submission, or state that there is no closely related paper.

Upload the cover letter as a separate file when you submit the manuscript.

Title Page: Include the following details on the title page:

Upload the title page as a separate file when you submit the manuscript.

Style: We prefer text with clear, declarative sentences in the active voice (see “Writing for Epidemiology”). Once a manuscript is accepted, we edit and return it to the author for final approval. All co-authors are responsible for all parts of their paper, including changes made by the manuscript editor and approved by the corresponding author.

Please adhere to the following style and format details:

METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

Significance Testing: For estimates of causal effects, we strongly discourage the use of categorized P-values and language referring to statistical significance (see discussion of this topic). We prefer instead interval estimation, which conveys the precision of the estimate with respect to sampling variability. We are more open to testing with respect to modeling decisions, such as for tests of interaction (see editorial) and for tests for trend, and with respect to studies using high-dimensional testing, such as genome-wide association or other genomic platforms.

Reproducibility: The editors encourage authors to provide information that enables other researchers to reproduce their analyses (see editorial). For example, include:

Interactions: We prefer evaluation of interactions between variables as departure from additive effects. Whether evaluated as departure from additive or multiplicative effects, authors who report interactions should present effects of the separate exposures and their joint effects (with confidence intervals)—each relative to the group not exposed to either factor. An equivalent approach is to report the relevant parameters from a regression model (i.e., the individual coefficients for both exposures and their product term) (see editorial).

Validity: We encourage the use of quantitative methods to evaluate the influence of important threats to validity, including missing data, differential selection or loss-to-follow-up, confounding due to an unmeasured potential confounder, or measurement error (see Good Practices paper).

Precision: Avoid an excessive number of decimal places (pseudo-precision). For example, percents should be rounded to nn%, n.n%, or 0.0n% and risk ratios should be rounded to nn, n.n, or 0.nn unless clarity of the presentation and the sample size justify more significant digits (see editorial).

Study participation: Provide detailed information on the number and response proportions at each step in the assembly of the study population and analysis of data (see editorial). Flow charts to depict study enrollment can be very effective in portraying this information.

Instrumental variables: We provide specific guidelines for reporting instrument variable analyses (see guidelines).

Comparative effectiveness and safety research: Specify the randomized trial that is being emulated (see editorial).

FOR RESEARCHERS FROM LOW RESOURCE COUNTRIES

Resources, including a mentoring program, are available to help researchers in low resource countries publish their work. Consult AuthorAID. Authors of papers on environmental epidemiology can sign up for AuthorAID through a special program of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology.

Researchers from low resource countries can use the World Health Organization's HINARI program for free or low-cost access to the medical and public health literature.

MANUSCRIPT SECTIONS

Abstract: Research articles should have a structured abstract, with headings for Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. The Methods section should identify the study population, study years, and location, if appropriate. Unstructured abstracts are allowed for unstructured papers (e.g., methodology papers). Abstracts are limited to 250 words (150 words for Brief Reports); these do not count as part of the main text word count. Do not include references in abstracts. Use abbreviations sparingly and only in accordance with the instructions above.

Enter the abstract in 2 places: the appropriate box in Editorial Manager and also as the first page of the main text file.

Main Text: Include the following in the main text file: the abstract, the body of the text, tables, figures, figure legends, and reference list.

Discussion: Policy implications of research results are reserved for commentaries, and may not be included in research reports (see editorial). As noted above, Epidemiology prefers quantitative evaluation of threats to validity in the methods, results, and discussion over qualitative descriptions in a list of limitations presented in the Discussion.

Tables: Prepare tables using the “Table” feature of your word processing software. Tables from Excel or other spreadsheet programs should not be used. Double-space tables, and use no lines except horizontal lines in the headings. See any issue of EPIDEMIOLOGY for examples.

Number tables in order of their presentation in text. Give each table a clear title, without repeating details from the text. Explanatory footnotes should be labeled with lower-case letters, in alphabetical order.

Figures: Well-designed figures can enhance papers greatly. Aim for clarity and simplicity, using words and numbers sparingly. Make font sizes larger and lines heavier than the default of most graphics generators in software programs. Show ratio measures (such as odds ratios) on a logarithmic scale. Twenty tips for preparing figures can be found here.

Submit figures exactly as you would like them to appear in print. Figures are typically published as one column width (8.5 cm); prepare them approximately this size. See any issue of EPIDEMIOLOGY for examples.

Number figures in the order they are discussed in the text. For figures with several parts, label each part alphabetically (A, B, etc.) in the upper left corner of the figure. Panel figures should have the same scale for all axes. Color figures are printed at the author's expense, except when the Open Access fee is paid (see Publication Charges).

The instructions below detail the publisher's requirements for production of figures. Authors are not required to adhere to these specifics for initial submissions, but for accepted papers authors will be asked to submit their final figures according to these instructions.

A) Creating Digital Artwork

  1. Learn about the publication requirements for Digital Artwork: http://links.lww.com/ES/A42
  2. Create, scan and save your artwork and compare your final figure to the Digital Artwork Guideline Checklist (below).

B) Digital Artwork Guideline Checklist
Here are the basics to have in place before submitting your final digital artwork (post acceptance):

Figure Legends: Provide brief legends for each figure.

Supplemental Digital Content (SDC): Electronic appendices can be used to provide additional text, nonessential figures, supplementary tables, data collection instruments, details regarding study methods, statistical computing code, and other materia (see also the Editors' Notepad). The article should be able to stand without this supplemental material; if information is essential, it must be part of the manuscript main text.

Supplemental Digital Content is not peer-reviewed or copy-edited; it is the sole responsibility of the author. The SDC is part of the article and is thus covered by the article's Copyright Transfer form.

Please follow the checklist below.

Step 1 > Create SDC files per these file requirements

Step 2 > Cite SDC call-outs in the manuscript text file:

Cite supplementary digital content in the text as eAppendix, eTable, etc. If possible, create one PDF file containing all SDC. If multiple files are required because the SDC includes computer code, a video, a database, etc., include in the main text a numbered list of Supplemental Digital Content.

Step 3 > Upload the SDC file(s) into Editorial Manager as part of the online submission process.

Data collection instruments: We request that you include the data collection instruments on which data are based (either the entire questionnaire or a subset of the key analytic variables) as an eAppendix. If the questionnaire is online elsewhere, provide the link in the main text.

References: Number the references in order of appearance in the text, tables and figures, and list them at the end of the main text file. Reference numbers in the text should be superscripts placed after punctuation. Any reference style is acceptable for initial submissions, but for accepted papers authors will be asked to put references in the format specified below. For more than six authors, list only the first three, followed by "et al." Verify all references using PubMed. Abbreviate journal names as listed in the Journals Database section of the PubMed Web site. Double-space the reference list. An Endnote output style is available.

Reliance on unpublished sources (such as personal communications, unpublished data, most abstracts, or papers under review) is discouraged. When cited, these should appear in the text in parentheses. For personal communications, include the name of the source, date, and type of communication.

Examples of Reference Style

Journal article
1. Botto LD, Lynberg MC, Erickson JD. Congenital heart defects, maternal febrile illness, and multivitamin use: a population-based study. Epidemiology. 2001;12:485-490. NOTE: If the journal article is an editorial, commentary, letter or abstract, include this word in brackets following the title of the article.

Book chapter
2. Greenland S. Applications of stratified analysis methods. In: Rothman KJ, Greenland S, eds. Modern Epidemiology. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 1998:288-300.

Entire book
3. MacMahon B, Pugh TF. Epidemiology: Principles and Methods. Boston: Little Brown and Co.; 1970.

Online journals
4. Harsha HC, Kandasamy K, Ranganathan P, et al. A compendium of potential biomarkers of pancreatic cancer. PLoS Med 2009;6(4):e1000046. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000046.

Web Site
5. National Cancer Institute. PDQ® - NCI's Comprehensive Cancer Database. http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cancerdatabase. Accessed April 14, 2009.

Unpublished material should be cited in the text only and as follows:

(AK Smith, written communication, June 2003)

(SB Jones, unpublished data, 2003)

Checklist for Submitted Manuscripts

Please review the list below to be sure you have all relevant components of your submission. See specifications above for each component. Order the components in Editorial Manager as follows:

Open Access

Authors of accepted peer-reviewed articles have the choice to pay a fee to allow perpetual unrestricted online access to their published article to readers globally, immediately upon publication. Authors may take advantage of the open access option at the point of acceptance to ensure that this choice has no influence on the peer review and acceptance process. These articles are subject to the journal's standard peer-review process and will be accepted or rejected based on their own merit.

The article processing charge (APC) is charged on acceptance of the article and should be paid within 30 days by the author, funding agency or institution. Payment must be processed for the article to be published open access. For a list of journals and pricing please visit our Wolters Kluwer Open Health Journals page.

Authors retain copyright
Authors retain their copyright for all articles they opt to publish open access. Authors grant Wolters Kluwer an exclusive license to publish the article and the article is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons user license. Please visit our Open Access Publication Process page for more information.

Creative Commons license
Open access articles are freely available to read, download and share from the time of publication under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommerical No Derivative (CC BY-NC-ND) license. This license does not permit reuse for any commercial purposes nor does it cover the reuse or modification of individual elements of the work (such as figures, tables, etc.) in the creation of derivative works without specific permission.

Compliance with funder mandated open access policies
An author whose work is funded by an organization that mandates the use of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license is able to meet that requirement through the available open access license for approved funders. Information about the approved funders can be found here: http://www.wkopenhealth.com/inst-fund.php

FAQ for open access
http://www.wkopenhealth.com/openaccessfaq.php

Page Proofs and Corrections

Authors have the opportunity to check the copyedited and typeset article before publication. The corresponding author will receive an e-mail with the typeset pages. Please send corrections to the editorial office within 48 hours; if you need additional time, you may contact the editorial office to request an extension. It is the authors' responsibility to ensure there are no errors.

Only the most critical changes to ensure accuracy are allowed at this stage. Changes that have been made to conform to journal style will stand if they do not alter the authors' meaning. The publisher reserves the right to deny changes beyond those that are absolutely necessary. Authors may be charged for alterations to the proofs beyond those required to correct errors or to answer queries.

Publisher's contact: For questions about accessing the proofs or other production issues, contact Anna Butrim (anna.butrim@wolterskluwer.com).

Reprints and Publication Charges

Reprints: Authors will receive a reprint order form from the publisher. Reprints are normally shipped 6–8 weeks after publication. Electronic reprints are also available. Purchasing ePrints enables you to redistribute the PDF file either by e-mail or by posting it to your website.

You can also order paper or electronic reprints from the journal's home page. Contact the Author Reprint Department with any questions (800.341.2258 or reprints@lww.com).

Publication charges:

Billing follows publication. ISEE members enjoy reduced rates. Authors who select the Open Access publication option will not be charged page charges or print color costs. Questions on billing should be addressed to the Author Reprint Department (800.341.2258 or reprints@lww.com).