Preparing main manuscript text for jHASE review article submissions

jHASE Article Template: You can download a template (Mac and Windows compatible; Microsoft Word 98/2000) for your article. For instructions on use, see below.

The Accession Numbers of any nucleic acid sequences, protein sequences or atomic coordinates cited in the manuscript should be provided, in square brackets and include the corresponding database name; for example, [EMBL:AB026295, EMBL:AC137000, DDBJ:AE000812, GenBank:U49845, PDB:1BFM, Swiss-Prot:Q96KQ7, PIR:S66116].

The databases for which we can provide direct links are: EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (EMBL), DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ ), GenBank at the NCBI (GenBank), Protein Data Bank (PDB), Protein Information Resource (PIR) and the Swiss-Prot Protein Database (Swiss-Prot).

IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT REVIEW ARTICLE SUBMISSION TO jHASE:

Review articles are usually commissioned (i.e. opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board may write these articles), but unsolicited reviews are welcome upon prior submission of an outline of a proposed review article with jHASE.

Rationale:  
The exponential increase in the number of original papers in medicine and science makes it extremely difficult for the average reader to keep up to date. The problem is compounded in pulmonary and critical care medicine by the enormous breadth of the field. The primary literature is often fragmentary and can appear as unrelated pieces of information. Scientific journals rightly set great store on original research reports, but progress in science is also dependent on a certain aging process, whereby earlier findings are reanalyzed, previously undetected ambiguities are identified, and concepts are refined. Review articles play an important role in scientific communication by taking the information from an individual paper and placing it in context, showing how it adds to the accretion of knowledge. These articles should be comprehensive, authoritative, reviews of the state-of-the art or literature on any subject within the journal’s scope. A review article should have an educational aim, be critical or analytical, or tutorial, in nature, so that it will provide practitioners with reliable facts and conclusions without their having to search the literature for themselves, or inform researchers where a field stands, what the gaps in knowledge are that indicate in which directions research should go. Review articles should therefore improve understanding about a particular subject. In addition, review articles may also be used to indicate how knowledge can be translated into use -- unlike research articles for communication of one's original findings.

The writing:
Review articles are ideally 1500-3000 words. These may be broken down into topical types such as basic science, clinical, public health or epidemiology literature reviews, ethics, legislative and regulatory affairs, pro/con debates, equipment, textbook and software reviews and thematic series to highlight/summarize specific topics in the field of applied HIV/AIDS Epidemiology. Unpublished data should not be included in a review article. A review article that simply documents the published literature is of limited value (4).
More specifically, the following guidance should be helpful:

• The author of a good review article evaluates a mass of primary research studies, and selects those of high quality and relevance. With this raw material, the author analyzes, interprets and integrates the information, shaping it into an organized and compact product that is more manageable for the reader. A major challenge is compression: how to take a tangled mass of facts, eliminate those that do not enhance understanding, and convert the remainder into a coherent narrative.

• The good review article is not a catalog of the various studies in a field, as in the manner of "Smith found this and Jones found that." Instead, the author places broad conceptual ideas into an integrative narrative. A major challenge is organization and structure: how to write sentences that form a linear sequence, one connected to the next by a logical extension of thought. The author does not cover every primary paper in a field, since all are not of equal quality. Writing a good review article is an act of scientific synthesis.

• The author presents a rational assessment of controversial matters, commenting impartially on obvious contradictions and, when appropriate, criticizing original work. A review article offers an opportunity to provide perspective on the data in the primary literature, arriving at new hypotheses and predicting future developments in a field. It also affords a greater opportunity to communicate new ideas or hypotheses that derive from the primary literature. The writer of an authoritative review article cites the highest quality and most relevant primary and secondary literature, and the selection also conveys the legitimacy of an author's framework. In contrast to the deluge of references generated by a MEDLINE or PUBMED search, the good review article serves as a quality filter, directing the reader to the most influential journal and book literature. To demonstrate that information in the review article is current, authors should cite recent references; when submitting their revised manuscript, authors should cite work published during the time elapsed from their original submission to jHASE — these new citations can be justified in the cover letter.

Peer Review of Literature Review Articles

• To ensure that your review article is consistent with jHASE's focus areas and editorial interests, authors are strongly encouraged to send an Outline of the proposed article to jHASE ( see contact information for jHASE ) BEFORE starting to write your review article. The Outline should include a tentative table of contents, which is best presented in telegraphic style rather than in full sentences; a good table of contents has 100 to 300 words. Authors should state the scope of the intended article, the boundaries of intended coverage, and novel aspects, pointing out areas on which they intend to provide a new synthesis of information. Authors should list previously published review articles on the same topic, and explain in what ways the new manuscript will be superior. If the authors have previously written review articles or chapters on the same topic, they need to indicate how the new manuscript will differ from their previous reviews.

• To facilitate review of your review article outline, and reduce costs of developing a large pool of relevant peer reviewers, jHASE requires that all authors provide the contact details (including e-mail addresses) of at least four (4) potential peer reviewers for your review article manuscript. These should be experts in their field of study, who will be able to provide an objective assessment of the manuscript (authors are advised to identify potential reviewers and their contact info from the literature reviewed, i.e. among those who may have authored work on the topic of interest - please do not contact the potential peer reviewers, just provide names and e-mail contact info and jHASE will contact them). Any suggested peer reviewers should not have published with any of the authors of the manuscript within the past five years and should not be members of the same research institution. Authors should also state when they expect to complete the manuscript for the complete review article. Although not all author-suggested peer reviewers will be selected, outlines will be sent out for peer review by jHASE's international panels of peer reviewers to determine whether the proposed manuscript is likely to meet the requirements of jHASE.

A reader's best guide that a review article will be of high quality and worth reading is confidence in the journal's peer-review standards. All review articles received by jHASE undergo rigorous peer review and only articles satisfying the highest standards are published. When an original research paper is peer-reviewed, the referee evaluates the novelty of the hypothesis, the rigor of the study design, the soundness of the methodology, the approach to data analysis, and the plausibility of the findings. The focus differs when a review article is peer-reviewed. Here, the referee is concerned about the importance and relevancy of the overall subject matter, the comprehensiveness of the author's coverage, the emphasis given to individual studies, the legitimacy of the analyses, the new insights and ideas being offered, the ability to synthesize and integrate disparate observations, and the author's ability to communicate in a cogent and lucid manner.

When reviewers are assessing a review article for jHASE, they are requested to evaluate the following list of qualities, on a 1 (high) to 5 (low) basis:
Importance and relevance
Organization and structure
Comprehensive and recent work cited
Integration and synthesis
New insights provided
Clarity and cogency
Brevity
Likely significance after revision