Common Issues and Guidelines for Submissions to This Journal
To improve the standardization and quality of submitted manuscripts, common issues found in submissions to this journal, along with relevant guidelines, are outlined below.
1. Submissions should be advanced, scientific, and logically sound, with authentic data.
When human subjects are involved in the study, the manuscript must state whether the procedures followed comply with ethical standards established by the institutional, regional, or national committee responsible for human research and whether approval has been obtained from that committee, including informed consent. The ethical approval number should be included in the paper. For clinical trials, please provide the registration number; for animal experiments, ethical approval documentation for animal studies is required. Relevant statements must be added in the main text. For tables containing statistical values, specific statistical results should be provided—such as t-statistic, χ2, P-values—with P-values reported to three decimal places and other statistics to two decimal places.
2. Submissions must include the journal's "Paper Introduction Letter and Authorization Form."
All submissions to this journal must include a cover letter and authorization form. Authors should log in to the journal's official website, go to the download section, and download the "Cover Letter and Authorization Form for Practical Medical Journal" (https://www.syyxzz.com/CN/column/column12.shtml). After stamping with the author's institutional seal, please scan and send the documents to the email address: ly@syyxzz.com (recommended). There is no need to mail hard copies; please note the manuscript number in the email.
3. Article Structure
(1) Original research articles shall include structured Chinese and English abstracts (comprising the four elements of objective, methods, results, and conclusions), 3 to 5 keywords, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, and references.
(2) Hierarchical section numbering shall use Arabic numerals, e.g., "1", "2", "2.1", "2.1.1", etc. All level 1 to level 3 headings shall be numbered explicitly. For hierarchical divisions beyond level 3, numbering shall use parentheses, e.g., "(1)", "(2)", and shall be typeset in continuous paragraphs.
4. Author Affiliation Information
(1) Author affiliations shall include the city and postal code of the institution, detailed contact information (specific address including street and house number), and the full name of the institution in both Chinese and English.
(2) For authors affiliated with different institutions, the aforementioned information shall be provided for each author’s affiliation. If a corresponding author is designated, their E-mail address must be attached.
5. Funded Manuscripts
For manuscripts reporting research supported by funding bodies, a copy of the funding certification shall be submitted together with the manuscript, and the full name and grant number of the funding project shall be clearly indicated at an appropriate position in the manuscript. This journal implements priority review and priority typesetting for funded manuscripts; therefore, funding information must be explicitly stated if the manuscript is supported by any research grant.
6. Reference Requirements
The most common issues in manuscripts submitted to this journal involve missing issue numbers for journal articles, and missing edition numbers, publisher locations and publication years for edited books.
All references must be checked against the original text by the author to avoid errors including incorrect, excessive, insufficient or missing citations. References shall be formatted in sequential order according to the national standard GB/T 7714-2015 Rules for Content, Form and Structure of Information and Documents – Rules for Bibliographic References, and numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals in the order of their first citation in the text. For electronic documents, document type shall be marked after the document title. For authors of a reference, the first 3 authors shall be listed, followed by ", et al." for references with more than 3 authors. Titles of foreign journals shall be abbreviated in accordance with the format specified in Index Medicus; titles of Chinese journals shall be presented in full. Page numbers from the start to the end of the cited work shall be provided for each reference.
7. Abbreviations
Abbreviations are generally not permitted in article titles. When an abbreviation first appears in the abstract or main text, its full Chinese name shall be provided. The use of abbreviations shall be minimized; nouns with no more than 4 Chinese characters shall generally not be abbreviated to avoid impairing the readability of the article. When an English abbreviation first appears in the text, the full Chinese name shall be provided first, followed by the full English name and the English abbreviation enclosed in parentheses, separated by a comma. All words in the full English name shall be lowercase, and all letters in the abbreviation shall be capitalized unless otherwise specified by convention.
8. Tables and Figures
(1) All tables and figures shall be provided with Chinese and English titles, and numbered consecutively in the order of their first citation in the main text, e.g., Tab.1, Tab.2, Fig.1, Fig.2. Indicative phrases shall be placed at the corresponding positions in the main text, e.g., "see Tab.1", "see Fig.2" or "(Tab.1)", "(Fig.2)".
(2) Explanatory materials shall be placed in notes below the table or figure, and non-standard abbreviations used in the table or figure shall be clarified in the notes.
(3) Data for the same item (indicator) within a table shall have the same number of decimal places, which is generally one digit more than the maximum accuracy of measurement.
(4) Authors shall carefully verify the consistency between the content of tables/figures and the descriptions in the main text, to avoid errors such as describing P < 0.05 in the text but presenting P > 0.05 in the table.
(5) For specific formatting requirements of tables and figures, please refer to published articles in this journal.
9. Statistical Requirements
(1) All statistical symbols shall be italicized, with capitalization clearly distinguished, e.g., P value, t test, χ2 value.
(2) The specific name of the adopted statistical analysis method shall be specified (e.g., two-sample independent t test, two-sample Wilcoxon rank sum nonparametric test, etc.).
10. Use of Numbers
(1) Authors shall carefully verify all descriptions of sample sizes and other numbers in the text to avoid errors such as "this cohort includes 60 patients, 37 males and 13 females".
(2) The number of significant digits for percentages is determined by the denominator: when the denominator is ≤ 100, the percentage is rounded to the nearest integer; when the denominator ranges from 101 to 1000, the percentage is rounded to one decimal place, and so on. Authors shall round percentages in accordance with the numerical rounding rule (i.e., "discard digits smaller than 5, retain digits larger than 5, round to the nearest even number when the digit is 5": round up if there are non-zero digits after 5; round to the nearest even number of the preceding digit if all digits after 5 are zero) to ensure accuracy, e.g., 12.150 is rounded to 12.2, 12.250 is rounded to 12.2, and 12.155 is rounded to 12.2.
(3) A 1/4 Chinese character space shall be added between every three digits of Arabic numerals before and after the decimal point, e.g., 2 553.425 67.
11. Use of Units of Measurement
(1) The International System of Units (SI) shall be adopted. Authors shall not use non-SI units (except mmHg) unless the conversion relationship to corresponding SI units is provided, e.g., 1 kcal = 4.184 kJ.
(2) For the range of a percentage, the percent sign of the first parameter cannot be omitted, and shall be written as 53%–78%.
(3) For a range of parameters with the same unit, the unit only needs to be written after the last parameter, e.g., 36–42 cm.
(4) For descriptions of area and volume, the unit shall follow each individual dimension, e.g., the volume is 3.5 cm × 2.5 cm × 1.5 cm, rather than 3.5 × 2.5 × 1.5 cm3; the same rule applies to area.
(5) For the expression of time duration, unit symbols shall adopt legal statutory measurement unit symbols of China: h (hour), min (minute), s (second), d (day); "year", "month" and "week" are non-statutory units and shall be presented as Chinese characters. Use "per day" instead of "per d"; use "day 2" instead of "2nd d".
(6) Non-statutory units such as bpm and mM/L shall not be used, and shall be converted to beats/min and mmol/L respectively.
12. Consistency Requirement
Authors shall ensure the consistency of research objects described in the abstract, materials and methods, results, and conclusions, to avoid inconsistencies or contradictions such as describing A > B in the abstract but presenting A < B in the results section of the main text. In addition, names of groups, research objects and intervention measures used in the article shall be consistent throughout the text.
13. Specialized Terminology
Authors shall carefully verify the accuracy and correct spelling of all specialized terminologies used in the article.