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Instructions for Authors — BMC Medical Education

Source: https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/submission-guidelines

Submission guidelines

These submission guidelines will help you prepare to publish your research successfully in BMC Medical Education.

First steps

Before you submit your manuscript, we recommend you familiarise yourself with the following:

Get ready to submit

To give your manuscript the best chance of publication, follow these editorial policies and formatting guidelines:

Submit and promote

Now you’re ready to submit your manuscript.

Please note that a manuscript can only be submitted by an author of the manuscript and may not be submitted by a third party.

Aims and scope

BMC Medical Education is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on all aspects of education and training of healthcare professionals from students to experienced professionals. The studies the journal welcomes focus on educational outcomes and include valid comparisons.

Topics considered by the journal include research related to

As a BMC Series journal, BMC Medical Education does not make editorial decisions based on the perceived interest or potential impact of a study. Manuscripts are considered for publication if they are scientifically valid. For research articles, this includes having a clearly defined and sound research question, appropriate methodology and analysis, and adherence to community-agreed standards relevant to the field.

Fees and funding

BMC Medical Education is an open access journal.

Publishing your research open access in a journal makes your research publicly available for everyone to read. Readers do not have to pay for access; there are no subscription charges or registration barriers. This means more readers, citations and impact for research published this way.

Benefits of open access

Publishing open access (OA) offers a number of benefits, including greater reach and readership for your work:

Cited more1.6x more citations of OA articles than non-OA articles across all subjects

##### Downloaded more4x more downloads of OA articles than non-OA articles ##### Greater impact2.5x more Altmetric attention. OA articles attracted 1.9x more news mentions and 1.2x more policy mentions

Open access also enables compliance with many major funder policies internationally. Find out more about benefits of open access.

Publication fee

An article processing charge (APC) applies for each article accepted for publication in BMC Medical Education. The APC price will be determined from the date on which the article is accepted for publication.

The current APC for BMC Medical Education is £2490.00 GBP / $3090.00 USD / €2690.00 EUR.*

This fee is subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable.

*This journal is part of Springer Nature’s country-tiered APC pricing pilot. To find out if you may be able to pay a lower APC, check the APC applicable to your country.

Please note that this pilot supersedes APC waivers and discounts for corresponding authors based in low- and lower-middle-income economies mentioned below.

Visit our open access support portal and our Journal pricing FAQs for further information.

Open access funding, discounts and waivers

Funding

Springer Nature offers agreements that enable institutions to cover open access publishing costs. Learn more about our open access agreements to check your eligibility and find out whether this journal is included.

Authors may also be able to access open access funding directly from their research funders and institutions. To find out more, visit Springer Nature’s open access funding and support services.

Discounts and waivers

Springer Nature offers APC waivers and discounts for articles published in our fully open access journals whose corresponding authors are based in the world’s lowest income countries. For more information, see our APC waivers and discounts policy.

Requests for APC waivers and discounts from other authors will be considered on a case-by-case basis, and may be granted in cases of financial need. Learn more about our open access policies for journals.

All applications for discretionary APC waivers and discounts should be made at the point of manuscript submission; requests made during the review process or after acceptance are unable to be considered.

Licensing and copyright

Open access articles in Springer Nature journals are published under Creative Commons licences. These provide an industry-standard framework to support easy re-use of open access material. Under Creative Commons licences, authors retain copyright of their articles. ## Creative Commons licences

BMC Medical Education articles are published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International licence) or CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence) licence.

CC BY-NC-ND: The article can be shared for non-commercial purposes as long as the authors are credited. Permission is needed for commercial re-use or sharing adapted and derivative versions.CC BY: The article may be shared and adapted for any purpose, including commercially, so long as the authors are credited.

You may also wish to find out about licence variations that are available to meet funder and institutional open access licence requirements. Learn more in our guide to licensing, copyright and author rights for journal articles.

Prepare your manuscript

This section provides general style and formatting information only. Formatting guidelines for specific article types can be found below.

General formatting guidelines

Preparing main manuscript text

Quick points:

File formats

The following word processor file formats are acceptable for the main manuscript document:

Please note: editable files are required for processing in production. If your manuscript contains any non-editable files (such as PDFs) you will be required to re-submit an editable file when you submit your revised manuscript, or after editorial acceptance in case no revision is necessary.

Additional information for TeX/LaTeX users

You are encouraged to use the Springer Nature LaTeX template when preparing a submission. A PDF of your manuscript files will be compiled during submission using pdfLaTeX and TexLive 2021.

All relevant editable source files must be uploaded during the submission process. Failing to submit these source files will cause unnecessary delays in the production process.

**Data and materials **

All BioMed Central journals strongly encourage or require authors to provide all datasets on which the conclusions of their manuscripts rely. You may either deposit datasets in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or present them in the main paper or in additional supporting files. Please provide datasets in a machine-readable format (such as spreadsheets rather than PDFs). You will find data repository guidance in our editorial policies.

To find out if providing data is an absolute requirement for your submission, please read the relevant article-type information.

Where there is a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories, submission to a community-endorsed public repository is mandatory.

For all manuscripts, information about data availability should be detailed in an ‘Availability of data and materials’ section. For more information on the content of this section, please see the ‘Declarations’ section of the relevant journal’s article type page in the submission guidelines. Read more about our policies on data availability.

Formatting the 'Availability of data and materials' section of your manuscript

The following format for the 'Availability of data and materials section of your manuscript should be used:

"The dataset(s) supporting the conclusions of this article is(are) available in the [repository name] repository, [unique persistent identifier and hyperlink to dataset(s) in https:// format]."

The following format is required when data are included as additional files:

"The dataset(s) supporting the conclusions of this article is(are) included within the article (and its additional file(s))."

BioMed Central endorses the Force 11 Data Citation Principles and requires that all publicly available datasets be fully referenced in the reference list with an accession number or unique identifier such as a DOI.

For databases, this section should state the web/ftp address at which the database is available and any restrictions to its use by non-academics.

For software, this section should include:

Information on available repositories for other types of scientific data, including clinical data, can be found in our editorial policies.

References

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice.

Please also check the submission guidelines for the relevant journal and article type.

What should be cited?

Only articles, clinical trial registration records and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers, may be cited.

Unpublished abstracts, unpublished data and personal communications should not be included in the reference list, but may be included in the text and referred to as "unpublished observations" or "personal communications" giving the names of the involved researchers. Obtaining permission to quote personal communications and unpublished data from the cited colleagues is the responsibility of the author. Only footnotes are permitted. Journal abbreviations follow Index Medicus/MEDLINE.

Any in-press articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers' assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the editorial office.

How to format your references

Please check the Instructions for Authors for the relevant journal and article type for examples of the relevant reference style.

Web links and URLs: All web links and URLs, including links to the authors' own websites, should be given a reference number and included in the reference list rather than within the text of the manuscript. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, as well as the date the site was accessed, in the following format:

The Mouse Tumor Biology Database. https://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do. Accessed 20 May 2013.

If an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs, then they should be included in the reference.

Authors may wish to make use of reference management software to ensure that reference lists are correctly formatted.

Preparing illustrations and figures

When preparing figures, please follow the formatting instructions below.

Figure file types

We accept the following file formats for figures:

For information and suggestions of suitable file formats for specific figure types, read more about data presentation.

Figure size and resolution

Figures are resized during publication of the final full text and PDF versions to conform to the BioMed Central standard dimensions, which are detailed below.

Figures on the web:

Figures in the final PDF version:

Figures should be designed such that all information, including text, is legible at these dimensions. All lines should be wider than 0.25 pt when constrained to standard figure widths. All fonts must be embedded.

Figure file compression

If you have any questions or are experiencing a problem with figures, please contact our customer service team at info@biomedcentral.com.

Preparing tables

When preparing tables, please follow the formatting instructions below.

If you have any questions or are experiencing a problem with tables, please contact our customer service team at info@biomedcentral.com.

Preparing additional files

As the length and quantity of data is not restricted for many article types, authors can provide datasets, tables, movies, or other information as additional files.

All additional files will be published along with the accepted article. Do not include files such as patient consent forms, certificates of language editing, or revised versions of the main manuscript document with tracked changes. Such files, if requested, should be sent by email to the journal’s editorial email address, quoting the manuscript reference number. Please do not send completed patient consent forms unless requested.

Results that would otherwise be indicated as "data not shown" should be included as additional files. Since many web links and URLs rapidly become broken, BioMed Central requires that supporting data are included as additional files, or deposited in a recognised repository. Please do not link to data on a personal/departmental website. Do not include any individual participant details. The maximum file size for additional files is 20 MB each, and files will be virus-scanned on submission. Each additional file should be cited in sequence within the main body of text.

If additional material is provided, please list the following information in a separate section of the manuscript text:

Additional files should be named "Additional file 1" and so on and should be referenced explicitly by file name within the body of the article, e.g. 'An additional movie file shows this in more detail [see Additional file 1]'.

For further guidance on how to use additional files or recommendations on how to present particular types of data or information, please see How to use additional files.

Language editing

Presenting your work in well-written English gives the best chance for editors and reviewers to understand it and evaluate it fairly.

Help with writing in English

If you need help with writing in English, you can:

Language editing and manuscript preparation services

Many researchers find that Springer Nature Author Services can improve how their manuscripts are read and make it easier for readers to appreciate the work.

Our expert-provided services cover:

We offer authors publishing with us a 15% discount the first time they use this service.Get started and save 15%.

Language quality checker

You can also upload your manuscript and get a free language check from our partner AJE. The software uses AI to make suggestions that can improve writing quality. Trained on 300,000+ research manuscripts from more than 400+ areas of study and over 2000 field-specific topics the tool will deliver fast, highly accurate English language improvements. Your paper will be digitally edited and returned to you within approximately 10 minutes.Try the tool for free now.

Please note that using these tools, or any other service, is not a requirement for publication and does not imply or guarantee that editors will accept the article, or even select it for peer review.

Prepare supporting information

Please make sure you have the following information available before you submit your manuscript:

Author information

Full names and email addresses of all co-authors on your manuscript.

Cover letter

A cover letter that includes the following information, as well as any additional information requested in the instructions for your specific article type (see Prepare your manuscript):

Peer reviewers

In your cover letter, you may suggest potential peer reviewers for your manuscript. If you wish to do so, please provide institutional email addresses where possible, or information which will help the Editor to verify the identity of the reviewer (for example an ORCID or Scopus ID). Intentionally falsifying information, for example, suggesting reviewers with a false name or email address, will result in rejection of your manuscript and may lead to further investigation in line with our misconduct policy.

You may also enter details of anyone who you would prefer not to review your manuscript, in your cover letter.

Editorial policies

Visit the BioMed Central website to read our full editorial policies.

Peer review policy

Peer review is the process used to evaluate the quality of a manuscript before publication. Independent researchers in the relevant field assess submitted manuscripts to check their validity and robustness. Their feedback guides editors in making publication decisions.

Typically, two or more experts evaluate each manuscript based on three main criteria:

Editors make their decisions based on the reviewers' reports and may consult with members of the editorial board if necessary.

BMC Medical Education operates a transparent peer review system, where, if the article is published, the reviewer reports are published online alongside the article under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 but the reviewer is not named.

Transparent peer review increases transparency. In addition, published reports can serve an educational purpose in helping facilitate training and research into peer review.

All manuscripts submitted to this journal, including those submitted to collections and special issues, are assessed in line with our editorial policies and the journal’s peer review process. Reviewers and editors are required to declare competing interests and can be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists.

Manuscript transfers

A manuscript transfer provides a convenient way of resubmitting your manuscript file and any reviewer comments to another journal within our publishing portfolio.

We are committed to helping you find the right home for your research and we’ll provide you with guidance and technical support through all stages of the transfer process.

What are the benefits of a transfer?

Choice – A transfer offer provides a selection of suitable alternative journals within Springer Nature. This helps ensure that you find an appropriate home for your research, so that it reaches the right audience.

Save time – No reformatting is necessary and files can be automatically transferred.

What is the Transfer Desk?

The Transfer Desk helps authors who have not been successful in their original submission.

If your research is of good quality, it may be suitable for another journal.

The Transfer Desk aims to deliver choice and support to you as an author, by presenting a range of publication options and information about suitable journals, and providing personal assistance to help you find the best home for your research.

How does the Transfer Desk work?

A Transfer Desk Editorial Submission Advisor will combine your preferences and any editor recommendations with our journal-matching technology to find the best journal for your work within our portfolio.

If you choose to follow the steps to transfer your manuscript to a new journal, your input will be needed, both to agree to the transfer and to complete the submission to the new journal.

What if I do not want to transfer my manuscript at all?

Your manuscript will not be transferred without your input. After an editor rejects a manuscript and suggests it may be suitable for a transfer, the editor will send out their decision letter including details of transfer options.

If you want to decline a transfer, you can follow a link within the decision letter and your file will be closed. Likewise, if you don’t take any action regarding the offer, your file will remain closed.

Withdrawing a transfer

You can withdraw a transfer at any point during the transfer by contacting the Transfer Desk. You are under no obligation to submit your manuscript to the journals suggested by the Editor or Transfer Desk Assistant.

Any questions?

Please contact the Transfer Desk at transfersdesk@biomedcentral.com

Promote your publication

Individual articles are widely promoted by our marketing and communications teams. This could be through email updates, table of contents email alerts, posts on publisher homepages, social media, blogs and/or press releases to the general and scientific press. These may result in higher levels of views and downloads for each article.

Springer Nature also promotes journals at many major scientific conferences to raise awareness of the journal and its content.

All of our journals are also indexed within Springer Nature Link, the world's most comprehensive online collection of scientific, technological and medical journals, books and reference works.

We encourage you to promote your article using email, social media, Listservs, distribution at conferences, via your institutional research office or using other methods you find fitting for your research community.

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