Language

All papers must be in English. Authors for whom English is a second language must have their manuscript professionally edited by an English speaking person before submission, and professionally edited manuscripts are preferred.

Structure

If a study in a manuscript is similar in any way to another study previously submitted/published, or is part of multiple studies on the same topic, you must include a brief sentence explaining how the manuscript differs. You must also state that there it contains no identical material.

Title Page

The title page must contain both a descriptive and concise title of the paper, names and qualifications of all authors, their affiliations and full mailing address, including email addresses, fax and telephone numbers.

Declarations 

Each manuscript must contain the following list of declarations:

• Competing interests (have the authors any interest that would bias the publishing of this paper?)
• Funding (list any funding from which this paper is an outcome)
• Ethical approval (for research, has this been given, and supply reference number of the approval)
• Guarantor (the main author who will retain responsibility for the content and publication of the paper, and will be the point of contact for the editorial team)
• Contributorship (list the contributions of all the authors, eg, conceptualization of the study, finding funding, main composition of the manuscript, etc).
• Acknowledgements (any other contribution towards the development of the work, and dedication to those whom the authors wish to recognise in a particular way)

Abstract

A structured abstract should not exceed 250 words and should accurately reflect the content of the paper. The abstract should not include references or abbreviations and these headings used where appropriate: Aims, Background, Design; Methods Results, Conclusions, Implications for clinical practice.

Keywords

Please provide up to 6 keywords that are associated with the paper, which will allow it to be easily cited once published.

Acknowledgements

Details of sources of research funding, other support, and acknowledgements should be included (see above).

Word Count

Please state the number of words used (excluding abstract, references, tables and figures).

Main Manuscript (with no identifying material)

Original Articles - the body of the manuscript should be structured thus:

• Introduction (putting the paper in context - policy, practice or research)

• Background (literature review)

• Methods (design, data collection and analysis)

• Results

• Discussion

• Limitations (if appropriate)

• Conclusion

• Implications for clinical practice

Review articles - should be structured as follows: Introduction; Aims and objectives or purpose, Methods, Results, Discussion, Limitations, Conclusion, Implications for clinical practice. The methods should describe the search strategy - databases searched, search terms and date parameters. Inclusion and exclusion criteria for papers should be clearly described and the conclusions should make the relevance to clinical practice clear.

Research-in-Brief - submissions should be prepared using the following headings: Aims, Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions, Implications for clinical practice. They should not exceed 1,000 words and can include only one figure or one table and no more than five references. Abstracts are not required. It is a requirement for this type of paper that authors must seek permission from NPCHN before reproducing any part of the published paper in subsequent publications.

Commentaries/Responses – NPCHN follows the same structure for these as Journal of Clinical Nursing, whose information for writing commentaries and responses can be found at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/jcn_commentaries.pdf 

Discussion/Opinion Papers - can be structured thus: Introduction, Background, The thesis of this paper, Discussion, Conclusion, Implications for Clinical Practice. A structured abstract is required using the same headings as above with relevant modifications.

Any quantitative study requires that the author has sought advice from a statistician (who, unless one of the authors, should be thanked in the “Acknowledgments”. If complicated statistics are used, a statistician should be included as one of the authors and identified as such.

Headings and Sub Headings - please present headings in the manuscript in BOLD CAPITALS, sub-headings in lower-case and bold, and subsequent headings in italics.

References

We strongly recommend that citation of online published works and sites be done via a DOI (digital object identifier), which all reputable online published material should have - see www.doi.org/ for more information. This makes papers and references easy to trace, especially for citation counts and impact factor calculation.

NPCHN uses the Vancouver system of referencing.

Full details on using the Vancouver system can be found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=citmed.TOC&depth=2 (accessed 30 May 2009)

PLEASE NOTE: IN SOME VERSIONS OF ENDNOTE, IN THE DEFAULT VANCOUVER REFERENCING FORMAT, THE JOURNAL TITLES ARE NOT ABBREVIATED. THESE CAN BE FOUND ON THE FOLLOWING WEBSITE www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/journals

Please use superscripts (not numbers in brackets) in the text.