Submissions for Volume 6, Issue 2 are now open.
This submission round will continue throughout the summer holidays to 5pm, Friday 13 March, 2015.

Please note that these are the general submission guidelines. For the specific requirements for each of the submission types, refer to the ‘Submission Types‘ page. To see exactly what is involved in submitting, or if you are ready to submit, see the ‘Submit‘ page, which also contains the submission forms.

Authorship

All submissions must be the primary work of a medical student at an Australian university (except for letters). The student must be able to take public responsibility for the content.

Letters are the only submission type where the author need not be a student.

Submission Sources
Submission types accepted are original research articles, review articles, case reports, features (conference reports, elective reports, essays), book reviews, and letters/news (please see the ‘Submission Types‘ page for details).

Submissions could potentially arise from the following sources:

• Research projects.
• Submissions prepared especially for the AMSJ.
• Assignments (must be exceptional examples with a self-negotiated topic).
• Papers prepared for various competitions.

Submission Process
To submit to the AMSJ, please follow the instructions on the ‘Submit‘ page and complete a submission form, ensuring that the general guidelines on this page as well as the specific guidelines on the ‘Submission Types‘ page are adhered to.

Following the close of submissions for an issue, submissions will be screened and short-listed by the editorial staff to ensure that they meet submission criteria and standard. In the initial selection phase, editorial staff will be blinded to the identity of submitting students and their university. Successful academic submissions (original research articles, case reports and review articles) will proceed through the anonymous external peer-review process.

If revisions are required, authors will be contacted, and given a specific window of time in which to return a revised submission. It is the author’s responsibility to cooperate fully and promptly with any request of the editorial staff during this time. Proceeding to the author revision stage is NOT a guarantee of eventual publication. Following the revision stage, final article selection will be made by editorial staff.

Copyright
Submissions to the AMSJ must not have been previously published elsewhere. Authors will retain copyright of their submissions. By submitting, you are only providing the AMSJ with a licence to publish the submission as the first publisher. This obliges the author to mention the AMSJ as a source if they later republish the submission on another platform. Authors published in the AMSJ are free to submit to other journals that accept previously published work. However, authors should realise that they may not be able to submit their published work to other journals that only accept original work not previously published elsewhere.

Basic Formatting Requirements
Submissions should meet the following basic formatting requirements:

• Typed in English.
• A4 document.
• Single-spaced.
• Margins of 2.5cm on all sides.
• 12-point sized font.
• ‘Times New Roman’ font.
• Microsoft Word 97-2003 (*.doc) format.
• No indentation for new paragraphs, rather leave a blank line.
• At the beginning of the document (not on a seperate title page), please list the following:
  • Submission type.
  • Submission title.
• Do not include names or any other identifiable information in the manuscript (for editor blinding purposes).
• To assist reviewers, Word processing line numbers must be included as part of the submission and the manuscript must include new line numbers after every page. This can be done by selecting line numbers in the Page Layout tab of Microsoft Word.

Acknowledgements
Where relevant, authors should provide acknowledgement of contributions that do not justify authorship, technical help, financial and material support in an acknowledgements section of their submission document. This should follow at the end of the body text of the article.

Referencing
The AMSJ conforms to the Vancouver style of referencing.

Vancouver is a numbered style, where the references are listed at the end of a manuscript in the order in which they first appear. In-text citations should be in the form of numbers within square brackets, for example “[14]”.

For an overview of the Vancouver style, refer to the following document from the University of Queensland:
http://www.library.uq.edu.au/training/citation/vancouv.pdf

For an exhaustive guide to the Vancouver style, refer to the NLM’s Citing Medicine:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bookshelf/br.fcgi?book=citmed

References are not included in the word count of a submission.

Tables
Tables should be included in the submission document itself (at appropriate locations in the body of the text). They should be constructed as simply as possible. Large tables that cause formatting issues will be sent back to the author for revision or discarded. Information in tables should not be duplicated in the text, and tables should be relevant and necessary.

Tables should be labelled by number, with an appropriate caption. Captions must contain sufficient information to render tables intelligible without reference to the text of a submission.

Figures and Images
Figures must be completely original, unless permission has been sought for their use from the original source. If such permission has been granted, please attach a copy of the relevant correspondence as a seperate file.

They should be constructed as simply as possible, directly relevant to the submission, and aesthetically sound. Figures should be labelled by number, with an appropriate caption. Captions must contain sufficient information to render figures intelligible without reference to the text of a submission.

Figures must be provided in a vector format where possible, or alternatively in high-resolution ‘*.jpeg’ or ‘*.png’ formats. Different formats may be sought at a later stage if the submissions proceeds to publication. They should be attached as separate files as outlined on the ‘Submit‘ page. Only the captions should be included in the submission document itself (at appropriate locations in the body of the text).

Submissions Arising from University Projects or Assignments
For submissions arising from a marked university project or assignment, marker comments should be provided in the relevant field in the submission form.

Ethical and Academic Standards
Authors are responsible for ensuring that any research related to submissions was conducted according to rigorous academic and ethical standards, and patient consent was obtained where relevant.

We refer authors to the ICMJE guidelines: http://www.icmje.org/.

Details of ethics approvals must be provided in the submission form where relevant.

Conflicts of Interest
Authors are responsible for ensuring that they have avoided, or at least declared, any significant conflicts of interest associated with submissions. We refer authors to the ICMJE guidelines regarding conflicts of interest:http://www.icmje.org/ethical_4conflicts.html. A conflict of interest declaration must be included in the submission, containing either “none declared” or details of any conflicts of interest. There is also a conflict of interest section in the submission form.

Defamation
Authors are responsible for ensuring that submissions are neither intentionally nor able to be construed as defamatory or unfairly derogatory of any persons or organisations.

Permissions
Authors are responsible for ensuring that permissions were obtained from any supervisors or co-authors for submission to the AMSJ.