Revista da Sociedade Portuguesa de Endocrinologia Diabetes e Metabolismo

Instructions for authors

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • I declare that all authors had a substantial contribution for this manuscript.
  • I declare that all authors approve the final version of the manuscript.
  • I declare that the manuscript is not under review of any other journal, and that it has not been published complete or partially in any other journal.
  • I declare that the manuscript has not been previously presented.
  • If it has been presented in a conference, indicate name, place, and dates of the conference.
  • I declare that the article is an original contribution, that all the statements presented as facts are resulting from authors’ research, who are responsible for them.
  • I declare that the manuscript, complete or in parts, does not infringe any copyright and does not violate any privacy rights.
  • I declare that any authors’ conflict of interest regarding statements presented into the manuscript does not exist.
  • The authors declare that the procedures were followed according to the regulations established by the Clinical Research and Ethics Committee and to the Helsinki Declaration of the World Medical Association.
  • The authors declare having followed the protocols in use at their working center regarding patient’s data publication.

 

Author Guidelines

GUIDE FOR AUTHORS

Language
The title (and abstract and key words if applicable) must be submitted in both English and Portuguese.
Articles submitted to the Journal should be clearly written in Portuguese (from Portugal) and/or English of a reasonable standard.
Submissions that do not conform to these instructions may be returned for reformulation and resubmission.

Copyright 
All articles in this journal are Open Access and meet the requirements of funding bodies or academic institutions. Each article published in the Journal is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Articles can be read, downloaded, printed, and shared.
Submission of an article for publication implies the authors’ consent to publication under the applicable Creative Commons license and the terms and conditions of the Publisher’s Licensing Agreement.
It is the author's responsibility to obtain permission to reproduce illustrations, tables, etc. from other publications.
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete a 'Journal Publishing Agreement'. An e-mail will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' form or a link to the online version of this agreement.
Author rights: As an author you (or your employer or institution) have certain rights to reuse your work.
The Journal reserves the right to use plagiarism detection software on any submitted material.

Article Processing Charge (APC)
There is no Article Processing Charge (APC).

Self-Archiving
It is permitted to authors of Open Access articles to post the final, published version of their article in Open Access repositories or on other websites, in accordance with the Creative Commons license.


Ethical Considerations

If the work involves the use of animal or human subjects, the author should ensure that the work described has been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans; EU Directive 2010/63/EU for animal experiments; Uniform Requirements for manuscripts submitted to Biomedical journals. Authors should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with Human subjects. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.

Publication of patient data and photographs must not enable the institution or individuals involved to be identified unless accompanied by written permission for their use from the individuals concerned.


For studies involving patients, a statement must be included to the effect that the study was conducted in accordance with the amended Declaration of Helsinki, that the local institutional review board or independent ethics committee approved the protocol, and that written informed consent was obtained from all patients. The name of the committee, the name of the chairperson of the committee (or the person who approved the protocol), the date of approval and the approval number should follow this statement in the Methods section. For multicentre studies, a list of the relevant approvals may be provided in a separate document to be published as supplementary material.

 

Privacy

The text, tables, figures, and supplementary data of submitted manuscripts must not contain any details identifying patients or study participants, including names, initials, date of birth, Social Security numbers, dates, or medical record numbers, unless written informed permission has been obtained from the patient, guardian, or next of kin and copies provided to the Journal prior to publication.
If photographs of patients are used, they must be accompanied by written permission for reproduction or must not enable the patient to be identified. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential, but patient data should never be altered or falsified in an attempt to attain anonymity.

Informed Consent and Patient Details
Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent, which should be documented in the paper. Appropriate consents, permissions and releases must be obtained where an author wishes to include case details or other personal information or images of patients and any other individuals. Written consents must be retained by the author and copies of the consents or evidence that such consents have been obtained must be provided. Unless you have written permission from the patient (or, where applicable, the next of kin), the personal details of any patient included in any part of the article and in any supplementary materials (including all illustrations and videos) must be removed before submission.

 

Permissions

All previously published and copyrighted material, including illustrations, diagrams and tables, must be accompanied by written permission for reproduction from the copyright holders.

 

Conflict of Interest

A conflict of interest exists when professional judgement concerning a primary interest may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Financial relationships are easily identifiable, but conflicts can also occur because of personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, or intellectual beliefs (examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding). All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. All authors must disclose, in the cover letter, any actual or potential conflict of interest. 
If there are no conflicts of interest then please state this: 'Conflicts of interest: none'.
Failure to disclose conflicts might lead to publication of a correction or even to retraction.

Clinical Trial Results

J SPEDM supports initiatives to improve reporting of clinical trials. This includes prospective registration of clinical trials in suitable publicly available databases. In line with ICMJE guidelines, J SPEDM requires registration of all clinical trials that are reported in manuscripts submitted to its journals. 
The ICMJE uses the World Health Organization (WHO) definition of a clinical trial, which is "any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes". This definition includes phase I to IV trials. The ICMJE defines health-related interventions as "any intervention used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome" and health-related outcomes as "any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants".

Registration of Clinical Trials
Registration in a public trials registry is a condition for publication of clinical trials in this journal in accordance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations. Trials must register at or before the onset of patient enrolment. The clinical trial registration number should be included at the end of the abstract of the article. A clinical trial is defined as any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects of health outcomes. Health-related interventions include any intervention used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome (for example drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, dietary interventions, and process-of-care changes). Health outcomes include any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants, including pharmacokinetic measures and adverse events. Purely observational studies (those in which the assignment of the medical intervention is not at the discretion of the investigator) will not require registration.
The trial registration number (TRN) and date of registration should be included as the last line of the manuscript abstract.

Registration of Systematic Reviews

J SPEDM supports the prospective registration of systematic reviews and encourages authors to register their systematic reviews in a suitable registry (such as PROSPERO). Authors who have registered their systematic review should include the registration number as the last line of the manuscript abstract.

Availability of Data
J SPEDM strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files, in machine-readable format (such as spreadsheets rather than PDFs) whenever possible. We require a data sharing statement at the end of every research manuscript. For trials of drugs or devices the statement must state, at a minimum, that the relevant anonymized patient level data are available on reasonable request from the authors.
Options for formatting the statement are suggested here:
"Data sharing: patient level data [and/or] full dataset [and/or] technical appendix [and/or] statistical code [and/or] available at [/doi] [with open access/with these restrictions] [from the corresponding author at ]. Participants gave informed consent for data sharing [or ... consent was not obtained but the presented data are anonymized and risk of identification is low ... or consent was not obtained but the potential benefits of sharing these data outweigh the potential harms because ...]"
If no such further data are available, please use this wording: "Data sharing: no additional data available."
This option is not available for trials of drugs or devices.
Authors may be required to provide the raw data for research papers when they are under review and up to 10 years after publication.

Submission 
Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis or as an electronic preprint, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, including electronically.
All manuscripts must be accompanied by a cover letter. Assurance should be given in the cover letter that the manuscript is not under simultaneous consideration by any other publication. In the cover letter, the authors should declare their potential conflicts of interest and provide a statement on authorship.
To verify originality, your article may be checked by the originality detection service.

Submit your article
Please submit your article via http://spedmjournal.com/ 
 

Manuscript Preparation

Use of word processing software 
It is important that the file be saved in the native format of the word processor used. The text should be in single-column format. Keep the layout of the text as simple as possible. 
To avoid unnecessary errors you are strongly advised to use the 'spell-check' and 'grammar-check' functions of your word processor.

Publication Types

SPEDM J accepts the following publication types:

a) Original articles reporting clinical or basic research;

b) Review articles (including systematic reviews and meta-analyses) of clinical or basic-science topics;

c) Clinical Case Studies/Case Reports;

d) Images in Endocrinology;

e) Editorials, which are written at the invitation of the Editor and consist of commentary on articles published in the journal or on subjects of particular relevance;

f) Letters to the Editor, which consist of concise opinions on recently published articles;

g) Current Perspective

h) Guidelines. Please ensure that you select the appropriate article type from the list of options when making your submission.

Authors should indicate in the cover letter which manuscript type is being submitted for publication

Title page information

  • Title

The title should be given in both Portuguese and English and should be concise, informative, contain no abbreviations and not exceed 120 characters. The title may include a subtitle with a maxi­mum of 40 characters (including spaces).

  • Author names and affiliations

Where the family name may be ambiguous (e.g., a double name), please indicate this clearly. Present the authors’ affil­iation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the author’s name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name and, if available, the e-mail address of each author.

  • Sponsors

All entities that sponsored the work should be listed.

  • Corresponding author.

Clearly indicate who will handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication. Ensure that phone numbers (with country and area code) are provid­ed in addition to the e-mail address and the complete postal address. Contact details must be kept up to date by the cor­responding author.

Present/permanent address. Ensure that the e-mail address is given and that contact details are kept up to date by the corresponding author.
Present/permanent address. If an author has moved since the work described in the article was done, or was visiting at the time, a 'Present address' (or 'Permanent address') may be indicated as a footnote to that author's name. The address at which the author actually did the work must be retained as the main, affiliation address. Superscript Arabic numerals are used for such footnotes.

  • Abstract and Keywords

A concise and factual abstract is required. An abstract is often present­ed separately from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. The abstract must be written in both Portuguese and English. It should not contain abbreviations, references, or footnotes.

At the end of the abstract, a maxi­mum of six keywords must be included, using the terminolo­gy appearing in “Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)”.

  • Structured Abstract

A structured abstract, by means of appropriate headings, should provide the context or background for the research and should state its 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),