Guide for Authors

Submission guidelines

Our 3-step submission process

Before you submit

Before you submit, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the following.

  • Make sure you are submitting to the most suitable journal - Aims and scope
  • Understand the costs and funding options - Fees and funding
  • Make sure your manuscript is accurate and readable -Language editing
  • Understand the copyright agreement - Copyright and license agreement

Ready to submit

To give your manuscript the best chance of publication, follow the formatting guidelines.

Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences publishes the following article types:

  • Original article
  • Review
  • Short communication
  • Comments

Click the relevant link to find style and formatting information for the article you are going to submit.

  • General formatting rules for all article types - Prepare your manuscript
  • Make sure your submission is complete -Prepare supporting information
  • Copyright and license agreement - Agree to conditions
  1. Submit

Manuscript submission will be received only via the online system. All manuscripts submitted to Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences will be reviewed by two or more experts in the field. Papers that do not conform to the general aims and scope of the journal will, however, be returned immediately without review. The names of the reviewers will not be disclosed to the author submitting a paper.

  • Ensure that authors supply all supplementary material.
  • Please include in each file the following information: article title, journal name, author names; affiliation and e-mail address of the corresponding author.
  • Electronic supplementary material will be published as received from the author without any conversion, editing, or reformatting.
  • After acceptance, we provide support, so your article gains maximum impact in the scientific community and beyond.

Proofs: One set of page proofs (as PDF files) will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author or, a link will be provided in the e-mail so that authors can download the files themselves.

Aims and scope

Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal that publish original article, reviews, clinical studies, case report and editorial letters that concern with all fields of health sciences including medicine and pharmacy. This journal aims to deepen the medical and pharmaceutical knowledge by publishing high-quality peer-reviewed researchers. This journal is concerned in all fields of drug discovery including synthesis of new compounds, drug biological evaluation, Introducing new analytical methods, microbiological and biotechnological studies, bioequivalent studies as well as validation of new therapeutic or diagnostic molecular targets.  Current medical and pharmaceutical sciences is also interested in discussing new drug formulation and its mechanisms at cellular and molecular level.

Fees and funding

Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences has author-payable article-processing charges

Language editing

Manuscripts are accepted only in English. For editors and reviewers to accurately assess the work presented in your manuscript you need to ensure the English language is of sufficient quality to be understood. If you need help with writing in English you should consider the language editing services. Please note that the use of a language editing service is not a requirement for publication in the journal and does not imply or guarantee that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted.

Prepare your manuscript

Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences publishes the following article types:

  • Original article
  • Review
  • Short communication
  • Comments

Click the relevant link to find style and formatting information for the article you are going to submit.

Manuscripts should conform to the following reporting guidelines:

  • Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: PRISMA
  • Randomized Clinical Trials: CONSORT
  • Observational studies: STROBE
  • Studies of diagnostic accuracy: STARD
  • Animal pre-clinical studies: ARRIVE
  • Other types of health-related research: Consult the EQUATOR website for appropriate reporting guidelines.

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 main manuscript section above):

  • An explanation of why your manuscript should be published in Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences
  • An explanation of any issues relating to journal policies
  • A declaration of any potential competing interests
  • Confirmation that all authors have approved the manuscript for submission
  • Confirmation that the content of the manuscript has not been published, or submitted for publication elsewhere.
  • If you are submitting a manuscript to a particular special issue, please refer to its specific name in your covering letter

Peer reviewers

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.

Excluding peer reviewers
During submission, you may enter details of anyone who you would prefer not to review your manuscript.

Agree to conditions

Agree to conditions of submission, journal’s copyright and license agreement and article-processing charge (APC)

Copyright and license agreement

In submitting an article to Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences I certify that:

  1. I am authorized by my co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
  2. I warrant, on behalf of myself and my co-authors, that:
  3. the article is original, has not been formally published in any other peer-reviewed journal, is not under consideration by any other journal and does not infringe any existing copyright or any other third party rights;
  4. I am/we are the sole author(s) of the article and have full authority to enter into this agreement and in granting rights to Springer are not in breach of any other obligation;
  5. the article contains nothing that is unlawful, libellous, or which would, if published, constitute a breach of contract or of confidence or of commitment given to secrecy;
  6. I/we have taken due care to ensure the integrity of the article. To my/our - and currently accepted scientific - knowledge all statements contained in it purporting to be facts are true and any formula or instruction contained in the article will not, if followed accurately, cause any injury, illness or damage to the user.
  7. I, and all co-authors, agree that the article, if editorially accepted for publication, shall be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0. If the law requires that the article be published in the public domain, I/we will notify Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the time of submission, and in such cases the article shall be released under the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver. For the avoidance of doubt it is stated that sections 1 and 2 of this license agreement shall apply and prevail regardless of whether the article is published under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 or the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver.
  8. I, and all co-authors, agree that, if the article is editorially accepted for publication in Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, data included in the article shall be made available under the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver, unless otherwise stated. For the avoidance of doubt it is stated that sections 1, 2, and 3 of this license agreement shall apply and prevail.

Article-processing charge
Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences has author-payable article-processing charges.

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal.

Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences operates a double-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers do not know the names or affiliations of the authors and the reviewer reports provided to the authors are anonymous. Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two to three experts who will be asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, whether it duplicates already published work, and whether or not the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication. Reviewers will also be asked to indicate how interesting and significant the research is. The Editors will reach a decision based on these reports and, where necessary, they will consult with members of the Editorial Board.

Comments

Comments are short articles usually around 1000-1,500 words long that draw attention to or present criticism of a previously published article, book, or report, explaining why it interested them and how it might be illuminating for readers.

Short communication

Criteria

Short Communications are short papers that present original and significant material for rapid dissemination. For example, a Short Communication may focus on a particular aspect of a problem or a new finding that is expected to have a significant impact. Short articles include, but are not limited to: discovery or development of new materials, cutting-edge experiments and theory, novelty in simulation and modeling, elucidation of mechanisms. As Short Communications are expected to have higher than average impact on the field rather than report on incremental research, they will receive the prioritized and rapid publication.

Short Communications are limited to 3000 words and are not subdivided. The paper should contain an abstract, main body and references, and contain no more than 6 figures or tables, combined. The abstract is limited to 100 words.

Review

Criteria

Reviews are a feature of the journal that may include, but are not limited to, the following types of articles:

  • systematic and substantial syntheses of specific research areas,
  • evaluations of progress in specified areas,
  • critical assessments with respect to issues

within the scope of Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

As this journal operates a double-blind peer review system, please do not include identifying information in your main manuscript as this must remain blinded. If sections of your manuscript such as ‘Authors’ contributions’ or ‘Competing interests’ contain identifying information please include these in your Title Page, along with the author names and contact information, and upload this at the Attach Files step.

Original article

Criteria

As this journal operates a double-blind peer review system, please do not include identifying information in your main manuscript as this must remain blinded. If sections of your manuscript such as ‘Authors’ contributions’ or ‘Competing interests’ contain identifying information please include these in your Title Page, along with the author names and contact information, and upload this at the Attach Files step.

Preparing your manuscript

Title page

The title page should:

  • present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design
  • list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors
  • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
  • indicate the corresponding author

Abstract

The abstract should not exceed the specified word count for each manuscript type. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract.

Keywords

Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

Introduction

The Background section should explain the background to the study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature and why this study was necessary.

Results

This should include the findings of the study including, if appropriate, results of statistical analysis which must be included either in the text or as tables and figures.

Discussion

For research articles this section should discuss the implications of the findings in context of existing research and highlight limitations of the study. For study protocols and methodology manuscripts this section should include a discussion of any practical or operational issues involved in performing the study and any issues not covered in other sections.

Conclusions

This should state clearly the main conclusions and provide an explanation of the importance and relevance of the study to the field.

Methods (can also be placed after Background)

The methods section should include:

  • the aim, design and setting of the study
  • the characteristics of participants or description of materials
  • a clear description of all processes, interventions and comparisons. Generic names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses
  • the type of statistical analysis used, including a power calculation if appropriate

List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

  • Ethics approval and consent to participate
  • Consent for publication
  • Availability of data and material
  • Competing interests
  • Funding
  • Authors' contributions
  • Acknowledgments

If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

  • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
  • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval.

If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Consent for publication

If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including individual details, images or videos), consent to publish must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent to publish.

You can use your institutional consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Availability of data and materials

All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
  • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
  • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
  • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

It is a requirement that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:

Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number]

Competing interests

All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

Please use the authors’ initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

Funding

All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. The role of the funding body in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript should be declared.

Authors' contributions

The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section.

Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

Acknowledgements

Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

Authors' information

This section is optional.

You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

References

Examples of the Basic reference style are shown below. 

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.  http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do. Accessed 20 May 2013.

Example reference style:

Article within a journal

Evans, DA; Fitch, DM; Smith, TE; Cee, VJ. Application of Complex Aldol Reactions to the Total Synthesis of Phorboxazole B. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2000, 122, 10033-10046.

Article by DOI (with page numbers)

Slifka MK; Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. J. Mol. Med. 2000, 78:74-80. doi:10.1007/s001090000086.

Article by DOI (before issue publication and with no page numbers)

Slifka MK; Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. J. Mol. Med. 2000. doi:10.1007/s001090000086.

Article in electronic journal by DOI (no paginated version)

Slifka MK; Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. J. Mol. Med. 2000, doi:10.1007/s801090000086.

Book chapter, or an article within a book

Brown B, Aaron M (2001) The politics of nature. In: Smith J (ed) The rise of modern genomics, 3rd edn. Wiley, New York.

Complete book, authored

South J, Blass B (2001) The future of modern genomics. Blackwell, London.

Complete book, edited

Smith J, Brown B (eds) (2001) The demise of modern genomics. Blackwell, London.

Article within conference proceedings with an editor (without a publisher)

Aaron M (1999) The future of genomics. In: Williams H (ed) Proceedings of the genomic researchers, Boston, 1999.

Article within conference proceedings without an editor (without a publisher)

Chung S-T, Morris RL (1978) Isolation and characterization of plasmid deoxyribonucleic acid from Streptomyces fradiae. In: Abstracts of the 3rd international symposium on the genetics of industrial microorganisms, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 4-9 June 1978.

Patent

Norman LO (1998) Lightning rods. US Patent 4,379,752, 9 Sept 1998.

Online document

Doe J (1999) Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. Available via DIALOG. http://www.rsc.org/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Online database

Healthwise Knowledgebase (1998) US Pharmacopeia, Rockville. http://www.healthwise.org. Accessed 21 Sept 1998.

General formatting information

Manuscripts must be written in concise English.

Quick points:

  • Use double line spacing
  • Include line and page numbering
  • Use SI units: Please ensure that all special characters used are embedded in the text, otherwise they will be lost during conversion to PDF
  • Do not use page breaks in your manuscript

File formats

The following word processor file formats are acceptable for the main manuscript document:  (Microsoft word (DOC, DOCX)).

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 if your manuscript is accepted.


Data and materials

Current Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences strongly encourages all datasets on which the conclusions of the manuscript rely to be either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main paper or additional supporting files, in machine-readable format (such as spread sheets rather than PDFs) whenever possible.

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 Instruction for Authors.

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 http:// 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))."

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:

  • Project name: e.g. My bioinformatics project
  • Project home page: e.g. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mged
  • Archived version: DOI or unique identifier of archived software or code in repository (e.g. enodo)
  • Operating system(s): e.g. Platform independent
  • Programming language: e.g. Java
  • Other requirements: e.g. Java 1.3.1 or higher, Tomcat 4.0 or higher
  • License: e.g. GNU GPL, FreeBSD etc.
  • Any restrictions to use by non-academics: e.g. licence needed

References

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. Either footnotes or endnotes 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.

Preparing figures

When preparing figures, please follow the formatting instructions below.

  • Figure titles (max 15 words) and legends (max 300 words) should be provided in the main manuscript, not in the graphic file.
  • Tables should NOT be submitted as figures but should be included in the main manuscript file.
  • Multi-panel figures (those with parts a, b, c, d etc.) should be submitted as a single composite file that contains all parts of the figure.
  • Figures should be numbered in the order they are first mentioned in the text, and uploaded in this order.
  • Figures should be uploaded in the correct orientation.
  • Figure keys should be incorporated into the graphic, not into the legend of the figure.
  • Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the illustration. Cropping figures improves accuracy when placing the figure in combination with other elements when the accepted manuscript is prepared for publication on our site. For more information on individual figure file formats, see our detailed instructions.
  • Individual figure files should not exceed 10 MB. If a suitable format is chosen, this file size is adequate for extremely high quality figures.
  • Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures (or tables) that have previously been published elsewhere. In order for all figures to be open access, authors must have permission from the rights holder if they wish to include images that have been published elsewhere in non open access journals. Permission should be indicated in the figure legend, and the original source included in the reference list.

Figure file types

We accept the following file formats for figures:

  • EPS (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
  • PDF (suitable for diagrams and/or images)
  • Microsoft Word (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
  • PowerPoint (suitable for diagrams and/or images, figures must be a single page)
  • TIFF (suitable for images)
  • JPEG (suitable for photographic images, less suitable for graphical images)
  • PNG (suitable for images)
  • BMP (suitable for images)
  • CDX (ChemDraw - suitable for molecular structures)

Figure size and resolution

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

Figures on the web:

  • width of 600 pixels (standard), 1200 pixels (high resolution).

Figures in the final PDF version:

  • width of 85 mm for half page width figure
  • width of 170 mm for full page width figure
  • maximum height of 225 mm for figure and legend
  • image resolution of approximately 300 dpi (dots per inch) at the final size

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

Vector figures should if possible be submitted as PDF files, which are usually more compact than EPS files.

  • TIFF files should be saved with LZW compression, which is lossless (decreases file size without decreasing quality) in order to minimize upload time.
  • JPEG files should be saved at maximum quality.
  • Conversion of images between file types (especially lossy formats such as JPEG) should be kept to a minimum to avoid degradation of quality.

Preparing tables

When preparing tables, please follow the formatting instructions below.

  • Tables should be numbered and cited in the text in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e. Table 1, Table 2 etc.).
  • Tables less than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed in the appropriate location within the manuscript.
  • Tables larger than one A4 or Letter page in length can be placed at the end of the document text file. Please cite and indicate where the table should appear at the relevant location in the text file so that the table can be added in the correct place during production.
  • Larger datasets, or tables too wide for A4 or Letter landscape page can be uploaded as additional files. Please see [below] for more information.
  • Tabular data provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls ) or comma separated values (.csv). Please use the standard file extensions.
  • Table titles (max 15 words) should be included above the table, and legends (max 300 words) should be included underneath the table.
  • Tables should not be embedded as figures or spreadsheet files, but should be formatted using ‘Table object’ function in your word processing program.
  • Color and shading may not be used. Parts of the table can be highlighted using superscript, numbering, lettering, symbols or bold text, the meaning of which should be explained in a table legend.
  • Commas should not be used to indicate numerical values.

For further information please contact the editorial office at :