Instructions to Authors: Submission Guidelines

The Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health (WestJEM) solicits contributions for publication through www.westjem.com.

Before submitting, please review the Submission Guidelines or see below.

*Additional Requirement as of 1/19/21 onward*

In order to improve the reporting of studies in West JEM, authors must include a checklist that addresses the recommended reporting items as an appendix during the submission process.

Observational studies: STROBE
Clinical trails: CONSORT
Systematic Reviews: PRISMA
Diagnostic/Prognostic studies: STARD
Qualitative Studies: SRQR or COREQ as appropriate
Quality Improvement Studies: SQUIRE
Economic evaluations: CHEERS

Checklist templates and examples can be obtained at https://www.equator-network.org.

Guidelines: 

For detailed Case Report and Images in Emergency Medicine guidelines, please click here. WestJEM adheres to the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).

If this is the first time you have submitted this paper to a scholarly emergency medicine (EM) journal, please follow the “Instructions to Authors” very carefully, as outlined below.

If this paper has been declined after peer review from another top-tier, reputable EM journal, and this is a resubmission of the same paper, you need not take the time to reformat the paper specifically for WestJEM prior to submission. We will accept any of the usual formats from the other EM journals (Annals of EM, Academic EM, American Journal of EM, Journal of EM) and subspecialty journals (Pediatric EM, Prehospital and Disaster Medicine) for example. We do ask you to include the same sections of our paper requirements (i.e. Original Research papers must have an abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, limitations, conclusion, and references). The minor WestJEM formatting requirements (i.e. spacing, format of references, etc) can be deferred until after the paper has passed through initial WestJEM peer-review, and is being seriously considered for publication. If there was prior peer-review, we strongly encourage you to respond to this critique, and submit an improved version of the paper to WestJEM. 

We hope this can streamline the resubmission process, save time and expedite publication. We are proud to serve as innovators in EM publication, emphasizing collaboration over any sort of competition in scholarly publishing. We look forward to reading your work. 

If this paper passes through peer review for WestJEM and receives a decision of “accept,” “revisions required,” or “resubmit for review,” at that time we will require proper formatting for WestJEM.

Please note in your cover letter if this is a resubmission of a previously declined manuscript (you don’t have to specify which journal), so that, on our end, we can dispense with the initial format check.

Submission Checklist

To facilitate prompt peer review, before submitting, please adhere to the following guidelines. Papers submitted without these features will be returned to the authors for completion.

Papers that have been declined by another mainstream emergency medicine journal need not be reformatted according to these guidelines prior to submission. Please include this fact, and absence of reformatting, in your cover letter. You need not divulge the previous declining journal. After peer review, if revisions are requested by the editor, then you will need to conform to the formatting requirements to follow.

• Upload manuscript as a Microsoft Word document
  • Entire paper in one document (but without title page) including abstract, text with tables and figures embedded within the paper in the order in which they are cited, and references.
  • For research papers, the abstract must include the major quantitative findings, including sample size, response rate, descriptive statistics, and statistical comparisons of major hypotheses and findings.
  • Anonymize with all author information and study locations removed throughout
• Each individual table/figure with its associated legend and footnotes (if present) on the same page (All legends must be sufficiently explanatory that they could be understood without reference to the article itself.)
• Appendices and Supplementary Materials should be included at the bottom of the main manuscript file unless they are in PDF format. PDFs should be uploaded as separate documents under “Supplemental Files.”
• Cover letter including corresponding author and first author contact information
  • Brief statement of justification, importance, and fit with the niche of the journal
  • Conflicts of interest (outside jobs, consultations, stocks, research support, financial interests, honoraria, speaker fees, military support, etc.)
  • Address and complete contact information for corresponding author and first author
  • 3-5 reviewer recommendations for the manuscript. They should be board certified in Emergency Medicine and have at least one publication in the field
  • List any grants received for the manuscript both in the acknowledgements section of the manuscript as well as in the cover letter. If it was an NIH or CDC grant, provide the grant number.
  • Include in the cover letter if any authors are members of one of WestJEM’s sponsoring societies: ACOEP, California ACEP, & Cal/AAEM. Please list the relevant authors’ names.
• Title page should include (not to be shared with reviewer to maintain anonymization):
  • Authors with respective titles (MD, PhD, MS, etc), institutions, and departments, city, state, and contact emails (12 author limit).
  • Which meeting (if any) where the research was presented.
  • Word count
  • Corresponding author and first author with complete contact information including phone number(s) – (please use institutional email addresses, personal emails will not be accepted)
  • Conflicts of interest (outside jobs, consultations, stocks, research support, financial interests, honoraria, speaker fees, military support, etc.)
  • Funding Statement (public funding agencies and/or private funding sources or the sponsor of the study)
• Individual files for figures, tables, and videos
  • Images in original format (.jpeg and or .png)
    • Do not upload .tif files
  • Videos must be in .mov, .mp4, or .flv format
  • Tables in Microsoft Word documents
  • Upload individual files under “Supplementary Files” section
• Signed patient waiver and permissions form acknowledging potential publication and accessibility on the internet for figures/videos containing a patient’s face, eyes, or other identifiers

Format

• Include title at the top of the first page (limited to 100 characters including spaces). Spell out all abbreviations no matter how obvious, for example, “emergency department”
• Include abstract before body
  • Structured abstract: Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion
  • Non-structured abstract (Review and Brief Educational Advances manuscripts only): Paragraph narrative
• Continuous line numbering is included in left-hand margin [WORD directions: Page Layout →Line Numbers →Continuous]
• Text in 12 point Times New Roman font
• Entire manuscript is double-spaced including references
• All footnote numbering must be in superscript format (Ctrl shift +) with the number following punctuation per this example: …to develop a standard of care.²³

Headlines

• List major headlines in BOLD, UPPERCASE lettering without colon
  • Subheadings are in bold and in title case lettering (first letter of each word is capitalized)
• Original Research: ABSTRACT, INTRODUCTION, METHODS, RESULTS, DISCUSSION, LIMITATIONS, CONCLUSION, REFERENCES
• Brief Research Report: ABSTRACT, INTRODUCTION, METHODS, RESULTS, DISCUSSION, LIMITATIONS, CONCLUSION, REFERENCES
• Review: ABSTRACT, INTRODUCTION, METHODS, RESULTS, DISCUSSION, LIMITATIONS, CONCLUSION, REFERENCES
• Educational Advances: ABSTRACT, BACKGROUND, OBJECTIVES, CURRICULAR DESIGN, IMPACT/EFFECTIVENESS, CONCLUSION, REFERENCES
• Brief Educational Advances: ABSTRACT, BACKGROUND, OBJECTIVES, CURRICULAR DESIGN, IMPACT/EFFECTIVENESS, CONCLUSION, REFERENCES

Figures/Tables/Videos

• For the ease of peer-review, all figures/tables/videos MUST be referenced within text of manuscript in the order that they appear, and all figures/tables are presented at the point of which they are referenced in the text (as opposed at the end of the manuscript). Do NOT only upload figures and tables as separate documents, or include them at the end of the paper submission. Include them WITHIN the parent paper as well, for ease of peer review.
• In addition, DO ALSO include EACH original file used to create graphs/figures (e.g. excel, word, etc.) in a separate uploaded Supplemental File. Videos should be uploaded separately as Supplemental Files as well.
• Remove any titles and/or bold fonts in graphs/figures
• Fully descriptive legends for each figure and table such that they could stand alone if removed from the context of the larger paper.
  • Table legends are above the Table and Figure legends are below the Figure
• Abbreviations in figures/tables must be spelled out or notated in legend or footnote, even if already done so in text
• All line art figures have a minimum resolution of 600 dots per inch (DPI) and images 300 DPI
  • To check DPI: Right click image file, Click “Properties”, found under Details
  • To change DPI: Open image using Photoshop, Click “Image”→Image Size→ Resolution→ 600 pixels/inch
• Every figure/video includes contrasting black or white arrows clearly pointing to important (even obvious) findings
• Tables are made in a Microsoft Word document using “Insert Table” function
  • Each column must have a heading
  • Minimum size of 2 X 2
  • Every row/column, including subcategories (i.e. female and male subcategories below gender category) should be split into own cells. This includes corresponding data for each sub-category.
  • Subcategories should be indented by 0.125 inches
    • Sub-subcategories should be indented by 0.25 inches

Example Table: Type fully descriptive legend here. (List all abbreviations here).

Videos

• Up to 1 minute for radiologic findings such as ultrasound, CT, or MRI
• Up to 5 minutes for other videos (e.g. demonstrations of a procedure)
• Videos must be narrated or annotated

References

• All submissions must contain references
• References created by a citation generator such as EndNote and Zotero applications will not be accepted. If you use these applications, you can use the “convert to plain text” option in their tab in WORD.
• They must be listed in the order in which they first appear in text (not alphabetically)
• References follow the American Medical Association Citation Style Guide. ((https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/ama_style/) except:
  • Authors: List up to three authors, before putting et al.
  • Remove DOI
  • Delete spaces between publication year, volume, issue, and page numbers
  • If a website is included , please include the date the source was accessed.
• In-text reference numbers should be placed after the period as a superscript, like this.¹
  • Arabic numerals (i.e. 1,2,3) are used instead of roman numerals (i.e. i, ii, iii)
• Journal names must be abbreviated and italicized according to the official journal abbreviation in the US National Library of Medicine (MedLine, PubMed)

Additional Resources: Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence (SQUIORE): http://www.squire-statement.org/ For Step-by-Step directions on how to upload your article, click for a PDF here: Instructions for Uploading a New Submission

For additional reporting guidelines please visit http://www.equator-network.org.

Updated March 2020