Author Guidelines

Aim and Scope

Applied Medical Informatics (Appl Med Inform) publishes mainly high-quality original articles and reviews in the field of medical informatics and applications of information technology in medicine, dentistry and pharmacy; medical, dentistry and pharmacology statistics; clinical and preclinical research that use statistics and informatics approaches; and research methodology. The interdisciplinary areas of the journals are as: Probabilities and statistics, Modelling and Calculus Theory, Software Systems, Organization of calculus systems, Computer Science and Information Technology, Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmacy.

Publishing in Applied Medical Informatics is free of charge. If your work is of good quality and fits the journal scope, we welcome it for peer-reviewing. If you decide to submit your paper, please ease our work by carefully adhering to our journal requirements.

Description of Manuscripts Types

Applied Medical Informatics welcomes manuscripts in the following categories:

• Research articles will provide a detailed description of scientific findings within the scope of the journal. The manuscript should not exceed 8 printed pages (4400 words including tables and references). This type of articles should contain structured abstract (200-250 words), divided as Aim-Material and Method-Results-Conclusion(s). The manuscript should be organized following IMRAD structure: Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, Acknowledgments and References. The manuscript must be formatted according to the guidance below.


• Reviews will be focused on significantly important topics related to journals’ aim. Reviews should contain unstructured abstract (100 – 150 words), up to five keywords and should incorporate a judicious use of tables, figures, schemes and references.


• Perspectives will follow the general scope of reviews but will have a focus on future predictions rather than past results.


• Research Letters will be a short version of a Research Article. The discussion could be integrated into the same section with the results as 'Results and Discussion' section; 'Conclusions and Future Directions' are optional.


• Editorials and Commentaries will be invited by the Editor to provide focused viewpoints of specific topics of interest. It must be written as continuous text without subheadings.


• Technology Platform will be invited by the Editor to provide a focused description of state-of-the-art R&D tools, methods and knowledge systems significant to specific topics of interest in medical informatics, medical statistics or research methodology. Could be written as continuous text without subheadings.

Covering letter: Please submit with the manuscript the filled and signed covering letter.

Manuscript Preparation

The manuscript should be written in English (US / UK spell) in a clear, concise and precise style. If you have any questions (regarding manuscript preparation, submission...) or maybe you encounter difficulties during the use of the website, please don't hesitate to ask for help: infoadmin@umfcluj.ro

Please use the template file when preparing the manuscript. Publishing in Applied Medical Informatics is free, so please ease our work by carefully adhering to our journal requirements.

The research articles must be divided into the following sections:

Title: The title of the article should be precise and brief and must not be more than 15 words. Authors should avoid the use of abbreviations.

Title page: Title page should include paper title, author(s) full name and affiliation, corresponding author(s) names complete affiliation/address, along with phone, fax and email.

Abstract: An abstract of maximum 250 words should be typed on a separate page in a form of a single paragraph and should be written in an informative style (purpose, basic methods, main results and principal conclusions).

Keywords: the content of the paper should be characterized by at least 3 and no more than 5 keywords in English (use MeSH when is appropriate) at the end of the abstract.

Introduction: Provide a context or background for the study (i.e., the nature of the problem and its significance). State the specific purpose or research objective of, or hypothesis tested by, the study or observation at the end of this section.

Give only strictly pertinent references and do not include data or conclusions from the work being reported.

Reference list. References are numbered in the list in the order they first appear in the text. The abbreviation of the journals can be found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=journals. For more information about reference style and format consult National Library of Medicine’s Citing Medicine.

Material and Method:

- The Methods section should include only information that was available at the time the plan or protocol for the study was written; all information obtained during the conduct of the study belongs in the Results section.

- Technical information. Identify the methods, apparatus (give the manufacturer’s name and address in parentheses), and procedures in sufficient detail to allow other researchers to reproduce the study. Briefly describe for methods that have been published but are not well known (provide also the references). Describe in details new or substantially modified methods, give reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations.

- Statistics. Describe statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to verify the reported results. When possible, quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). Define statistical terms, abbreviations, and most symbols. Specify the computer software used.

- Results or System developed: Present your results in logical sequence in the text, tables, and illustrations, giving the main or most important findings first. Do not repeat in the text all the data in the tables or illustrations; emphasize or summarize only important observations.

Give numeric results not only as derivatives (for example, percentages) but also as the absolute numbers from which the derivatives were calculated, and specify the statistical methods used to analyze them. Restrict tables and figures to those needed to explain the argument of the paper and to assess its support. Use graphs as an alternative to tables with many entries; do not duplicate data in graphs and tables. Avoid non-technical uses of technical terms in statistics, such as “random” (which implies a randomizing device), “normal,” “significant,” “correlations,” and “sample.”

Discussion: Emphasize the new and important aspects of the study and the conclusions that follow from them. Do not repeat in detail data or other material given in the Introduction or the Results section.

State new hypotheses when warranted, but clearly label them as such.

Conclusion(s): Link the conclusions with the goals of the study but avoid unqualified statements and conclusions not adequately supported by the data.

List of abbreviations (if any)

Ethical Issues (if any): Provide clear statement on the ethical issues if clinical or animal research has been conducted if applied.

Conflict of interest (if any): Conflict of interest statement, patient confidentiality issues, and permissions. Where an author gives no conflict of interest, the listing will read 'The author(s) declare that they have no conflict of interest'.

Authors' Contributions (not compulsory): The contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. (Suggestion: AB carried defined the aim of research and the design of the experiment. CD carried out the experiments. EF participated in the design of the study and performed the statistical analysis. GH coordinate and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements (if any): Please acknowledge anyone (individual/company/institution) who has contributed to the study by making substantial contributions to conception, design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, or who was involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content. Please list the source(s) of funding for the study (if any), for each author, and for the manuscript preparation in the acknowledgements section.

References: References must be listed in the Vancouver Style only. All references should be numbered sequentially [in square brackets] in the text and listed in the same numerical order in the Reference section.

References by example:

Journal Reference:

Martin JM, Jabot F, Marrel P. How to Organise the Medical Data of Chronically III Patients in the Computer. Meth Inform Med 2001;24:5-12. (journal article)

Kim E, Han JY, Moon TJ, Shaw B, Shah DV, McTavish FM, Gustafson DH. The process and effect of supportive message expression and reception in online breast cancer support groups. Psychooncology. 2011 Mar 17. doi: 10.1002/pon.1942. (journal article online first)

Lemanek K. Adherence issues in the medical management of asthma. J Pediatr Psychol [Internet]. 1990 [cited 2010 Apr 22];15(4):437-58. Available from: URL: http://jpepsy.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint /15/4/437 (electronic journal article)

Book and book chapter Reference:

Fauci AS, Braunwald E, Isselbacher KJ, Wilson JD, Martin JB, Kasper DL, et al, editors. Harrison’s principles of internal medicine. 14th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, Health Professions Division; 1998. (book)

Walker HK, Hall WD, Hurst JW. Clinical Methods. The History, Physical, and Laboratory Examinations. 3rd ed. Boston: Butterworths; [online] 1990 [cited 2011 March 20]. Available from: URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201/ (electronic book)

Speroff L, Fritz MA. Clinical gynaecologic endocrinology and infertility. 7th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins; 2005. Chapter 29, Endometriosis; p. 1103-33. (book chapter)

Conference paper:

Bolboacă S, Jäntschi L. Binomial distribution sample confidence intervals estimation for positive and negative likelihood ratio medical key parameters. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2005:66-70.

Thesis:

Yousof Ali Abdulla Al-Hammadi. Toxins and Their Phytoremediation Behavioural Correlation for Malicious Bot Detection [PhD thesis]. University of Nottingham; 2010. [cited 2011 March 20] Available from: URL: http://ima.ac.uk/papers/al-hammadi_thesis.pdf, 2010.

Webpages:

Atherton J. Behaviour modification [Internet]. 2010 [updated 2010 Feb 10; cited 2011 March 10]. Available from: http://www.learningandteaching.info /learning/behaviour_mod.htm

Supportive/supplementary material (if any)

 

Ethical considerations

Applied Medical Informatics adheres to ethical standards of publishing medical research. Our journal follows the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals:

I. Human and animal research

The researches involving humans or animals must have been approved by the authors’ institutional committee(s) board. The board must be named by the authors in the manuscript.

Human research: Informed consent must be obtained (or the reason for lack of consent explained, e.g. the data were analyzed anonymously). All clinical investigation must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the "Declaration of Helsinki" whenever the research involved human participants. The use of informed consent must be stated in the Methods section (written or oral). If informed consent was oral the following information must be provided in the Methods section: ▪ the reason for the impossibility to obtain the written consent; ▪ the committee board approved the use of oral consent; ▪ the method used to document the consent. Authors should be able to submit, upon request, a statement from the research ethics committee indicating the approval of the research. We also encourage authors to submit a sample of patient consent form as supplementary material.

Animal research: The researches involving animals must be conducted according to national and international rules, regulations and guidelines. Authors must include in Material and Methods section details of animal welfare and steps taken to ameliorate suffering whenever animals were studied. The institution that approved the study must be named, and it must be stated in the paper that the study was conducted adhering to the institution's guidelines for animal research.

II. Patient Privacy and Informed Consent for Publication

According to the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals:

• „Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information … should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that the patient be shown the manuscript to be published.”


• “Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent for publication should be obtained if there is any doubt.” If data is changed to protect anonymity, authors should provide assurance that alterations of the data do not distort scientific meaning.


• „When informed consent has been obtained it should be indicated in the published article."

 

Having problems?

If you have any questions (regarding Journal scope, manuscript preparation, submission, or others) or maybe you encounter difficulties during the use of the website, please don't hesitate to ask for help: infoadmin@umfcluj.ro