Author Guidelines
PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPTS
A: ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLES
The entire manuscript, including title page, abstract, tables, figure legends and references, should be prepared double- spaced in a Times New Roman 12- point font, with 1 inch margins. All pages should be numbered. The manuscript length should not exceed 3000 words for the text only (excluding abstract, acknowledgments, figure legends, and references) – justification must be provided for any manuscripts that exceed this length.
The general requirements listed in the next section relate to reporting essential elements for all study designs. Authors are encouraged also to consult reporting guidelines relevant to their specific research design. A good source of reporting guidelines is the EQUATOR Network (http://www.equator-network.org/home/).
Title Page
The title page should have the following information:
- Article title. Authors should avoid long, convoluted titles, as well as titles that are too short and lack important information (e.g. study design, important in identifying randomized, controlled trials). Authors should include all information in the title that will make electronic retrieval of the article both sensitive and specific. Avoid abbreviations in the title of the manuscript.
- Names and institutional affiliations of ALL Authors’.
- Contact information for corresponding authors. The name, mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address of the author responsible for correspondence about the manuscript (the “corresponding author”). The corresponding author should indicate clearly whether his or her e-mail address can be published.
- Word counts. A word count for the text only (excluding abstract, acknowledgments, figure legends, and references), and a separate word count for the Abstract.
- Source(s) of support in the form of grants, equipment, drugs, or all of these.
- Conflict of interest disclosure: all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest. Disclosure of such relationships is also important in connection with editorials and review articles. AJPT shall publish this information if it is important in judging the manuscript.
- Disclaimers, if any.
- List of abbreviations: Use only standard abbreviations. The spelled-out abbreviation followed by the abbreviation in parenthesis should be used its first mention in the text unless the abbreviation is a standard unit of measurement.
Abstract
The abstract should be of no more than 300 words.
Structured abstracts are required for original research articles and systematic reviews - sub-divided into background, objectives, methodology, results, discussion.
The abstract should provide the context or background for the study and should state the study’s purpose, basic procedures (selection of study subjects or laboratory animals, observational and analytical methods), main findings (giving specific effect sizes and their statistical significance, if possible), principal conclusions, and funding sources. It should emphasize new and important aspects of the study or observations.
Because abstracts are the only substantive portion of the article indexed in many electronic databases, and the only portion many readers read, authors need to be careful that they accurately reflect the content of the article.
Authors should include 3-5 key words at the end of the abstract.
Introduction
The Introduction should provide a context or background for the study (that is, the nature of the problem and its significance) and state the specific purpose or research objective of, or hypothesis tested by, the study or observation. Both the main and secondary objectives should be clear. Authors should provide only directly pertinent references, and should not include data or conclusions from the work being reported.
Same or very similar work should be referred to specifically and referenced in the new paper.
You will usually want to divide your article into sections and subsections (perhaps even sub-subsections). Headings should reflect the relative importance of the sections. Note that text runs on after a 3rd order heading.
Methods
The Methods section should include only information on the plan or protocol for the study; all information obtained during the study belongs in the Results section. Authors submitting review manuscripts should include a section describing the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting, and synthesizing data. These methods should also be summarized in the abstract.
As appropriate:
- Describe the methods in sufficient detail to allow others to reproduce the results. Give references to established methods, including statistical methods (see below); provide references and brief descriptions for methods that have been published but are not well-known; describe new or substantially modified methods, give the reasons for using them, and evaluate their limitations.
- Identify precisely all drugs/chemicals used, including generic name(s), dose(s), and route(s) of administration.
- Describe your selection of the observational or experimental participants (patients or laboratory animals, including controls) clearly, including eligibility and exclusion criteria and a description of the source population. Because the relevance of such variables as age and sex to the object of research is not always clear, authors should explain their use when they are included in a study report—for example, authors should explain why only participants of certain ages were included or why women were excluded. The guiding principle should be clarity about how and why a study was done in a particular way. When authors use such variables as race or ethnicity, they should define how they measured these variables and justify their relevance.
- Describe statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to verify the reported results.
Results
Results should be presented in a logical sequence in the text, tables, and illustrations, giving the main or most important findings first. Do not repeat all the data in the tables or illustrations in the text; emphasize or summarize only the most important observations.
When data are summarized in the Results section, 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 supporting data. 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.”
Where scientifically appropriate, analyses of the data by such variables as age and sex should be included.
Extra or supplementary materials and technical details can be provided as an appendix where they will be accessible but will not interrupt the flow of the text, or can be published separately in the electronic version of the journal.
Discussion
Emphasize the new and important aspects of the study and the conclusions that follow from them in the context of the totality of the best available evidence.
Do not repeat in detail data or other information given in the Introduction or the Results section.
For experimental studies, it is useful to begin the discussion by briefly summarizing the main findings, then explore possible mechanisms or explanations for these findings, compare and contrast the results with other relevant studies, state the limitations of the study, and explore the implications of the findings for future research and for clinical practice.
Link the conclusions with the goals of the study but avoid unqualified statements and conclusions not adequately supported by the data. In particular, avoid making statements on economic benefits and costs unless the manuscript includes the appropriate economic data and analyses. Avoid claiming priority or alluding to work that has not been completed.
Conflict of Interest declaration
Please also insert a Conflict of Interest Statement at the end of your manuscript, preceding any Acknowledgements and References using the phrase, “We declare that we have no conflict of interest” or alternatively state your conflict of interest.
Acknowledgements All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chairperson who provided only general support.
Corresponding authors should declare whether they had assistance with study design, data collection, data analysis, or manuscript preparation. If such assistance was available, the authors should disclose the identity of the individuals who provided this assistance and the entity that supported it in the published article.
Financial and material support should also be acknowledged.
References Although references to review articles can be an efficient way to guide readers to a body of literature, review articles do not always reflect original work accurately. Authors should therefore provide direct references to original research sources whenever possible.
However, authors should avoid extensive lists of references to original work on a topic – a small numbers of references to key original papers often serve just as well.
References to papers accepted but not yet published should be designated as “in press”; authors should obtain written permission to cite such papers as well as verification that they have been accepted for publication. 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 journal.
Information from manuscripts submitted but not accepted should be cited in the text as “unpublished observations” with written permission from the source.
Avoid citing a “personal communication” unless it provides essential information not available from a public source, in which case the name of the person and date of communication should be cited in parentheses in the text. For scientific articles, obtain written permission and confirmation of accuracy from the source of a personal communication.
Authors are responsible for the accuracy of references cited, and for checking that none of the references cite retracted articles except in the context of referring to the retraction.
The references should be cited in the text by giving the first author’s name (or the first and second if they are the only authors) and the year of publication (e.g., Griffin et al, 1991; Brain and Grant, 2004; Wallace, 2006).
If reference is made to more than one publication by the same author(s) in the same year, suffixes (a, b, c, etc.) should be added to the year in the text citation and in the references list.
Should appear at the end of the manuscript
References should be listed alphabetically by author and not numbered. Use Medline journal title abbreviations. The names of all authors should be given in the reference list.
The reference list should be stylized in the following format:
Brain SD and Grant AD (2004). Vascular actions of calcitonin gene-related peptide and adrenomedullin. Physiol. Rev. 84: 903-34.
Food and Drug Administration. Potentially life-threatening serotonin syndrome with combined use of SSRIs or SNRIs and triptan medications. www.fda.gov/cder/drug/InfoSheets/HCP/triptansHCP.htm (Accessed 11 Nov 2009).
Goldstein DB, Tate SK and Sisodiya SM (2003). Pharmacogenetics goes genomic. Nat. Rev. Genet. 4: 937-47. [Erratum, Nat. Rev. Genet. 2004; 5:76.]
Griffin MR, Piper JM, Daugherty JR, Snowden M and Ray WA (1991). Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use and increased risk for peptic ulcer disease in elderly persons. Ann. Intern. Med. 114: 257-63.
Reves JG, Glass PSA and Lubarsky DA (1994). Nonbarbiturate intravenous anesthetics. In: Anesthesia 4th ed. Miller RD (Ed). Churchill Livingstone, New York, pp 228-272.
Schierhout G and Roberts I (2000). Hyperventilation therapy for acute traumatic brain injury. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2: CD000566.
Stockley IH (1999). Drug Interactions: a source book of adverse interactions, their mechanisms, clinical importance and management, 5th ed. Pharmaceutical Press, London.
Tshibangu D (2010). Maslinic acid: A potential anti-sickle cell anaemia drug. Paper presented at: 3rd Meeting of the African Network for Drugs and Diagnostics Innovation 11-13 October 2010, United Nations Office in Nairobi UNON, Nairobi, Kenya.
Wesongah JO (2008). Development and validation of a chloramphenicol enzyme linked immunosorbent assay method for the determination and monitoring of chloramphenicol residues in livestock products [PhD Thesis]. University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya.
Winhoven SM, Coulson IH and Bottomley WW (2004). Brachioradial pruritus: response to treatment with gabapentin. Br. J. Dermatol. doi 10.1111/j.0007-0963.2004.05889.x
World Health Organization (2008). Guidelines for programmatic management of drug-resistant tuberculosis. WHO/HTM/TB/2008.402. Geneva, World Health Organization.
B: REVIEWS AND OPINION PAPERS The format of reviews and opinion papers is largely at the discretion of the authors, though the following components should be incorporated:
Abstract: 200 words unstructured.
Introduction giving:
- The background to the issue(s) presented, reviewed or discussed – similar or related reviews and/or opinion papers should be cited and referenced.
- Problem statement,
- Significance: why such a review or discussion is relevant and important
Main body of the article: structured into relevant sections, as appropriate.
Conclusion and/or recommendations