Author Guidelines

Chulalongkorn Medical Journal — Guide for Authors

Chulalongkorn Medical Journal is an international peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to disseminating accurate, reliable, and novel findings in biomedical sciences, clinical medicine, and related disciplines that are of topical interest to the medical profession.

Chulalongkorn Medical Journal adheres to ‘Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), updated May 2023 (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf)’. For any information not mentioned here, the authors should refer to the ICMJE Recommendations.

Type of Published Articles 

Medical and scholarly journals exert a central role in sharing scientific knowledge, providing a range of article types to accommodate diverse aspects of research and scholarship. While the principal interest of the Chulalongkorn Medical Journal concentrates on original research articles, the journal also warmly welcomes review articles, case reports, short communications, and letters to the editors.

  1. Original articles

Original articles are full-length reports of current research, which represent novel and substantial contributions to the field. These may include experiments, clinical trials, or observational studies. An original article presents a comprehensive research endeavor undertaken by the authors themselves. It explores in-dept a particular research question or hypothesis, frequently involving the gathering, analyzing, and interpretation of data. The main text comprises an introduction ending the section with the aim of the study, materials and method, results, discussion, and conclusions. The manuscript length, excluding references, should not exceed 5,000 words.

  1. Review Articles

Review Articles provide a comprehensive summary of existing research and knowledge on a certain topic, and a perspective on the state of the field and where it is heading. They synthesize and analyze the existing literatures to provide a broad and authoritative summary. The manuscript length, excluding references, should not exceed 8,000 words.

  1. Case Reports

Case Reports highlight unique cases of patients that present with an unexpected/ diagnosis, treatment outcome, or clinical course. Case reports describe individual patient cases, often with unique or unusual clinical findings. They can be used to document rare diseases, unexpected outcomes, or novel treatment approaches. The manuscript length, excluding references, should not exceed 2,500 words.

  1. Short Communications

Short communications are brief research articles that present concise findings or preliminary data. These articles highlight potentially groundbreaking developments in research. They are exceptionally suited for representing initial findings, innovative methodologies, or novel tool advancements. While concise, short communications must ensure sufficient context, methods, and outcome to enable readers to understand the significance of the work. The manuscript length, excluding references, should not exceed 2,500 words.

  1. Letters to the Editor

Letters to the editors are short articles that comment on or provide additional information regarding a recently published article. Letters are a way for researchers to engage in a scientific conversation and discuss the implications of published work. Despite their brevity, letters to the editor should uphold academic integrity and contribute to the dynamic. The manuscript length, excluding references, should not exceed 1,000 words.

Manuscript Preparation

Manuscripts must fit the journal’s aim and scope, are not under consideration by any other journals, and have not been published previously. All manuscripts must be clearly and concisely written in American English.

Files and Formats

Manuscripts should be typed double-spaced in a single column of A4 size paper and use a Times New Roman font with 12 pt. font size with adequate margins (2.5 centimeters/1 inch) in MS Word format.

Title Page

The title page should include:

  • Type of manuscript: Original Articles, Short Communications, Review Articles, Case Reports, Letters to the Editor
  • Manuscript title: The manuscript title should be concise and informative. Please avoid the use of any abbreviations.
  • Running title: A short running title (no more than 50 characters including space)
  • Author names: Full names (First, Middle (if any), and Last names) of all authors with superscript numbers to specify the affiliations.
  • Author affiliations: Use a superscript number corresponding to each author to provide the name of the department/division, institution, city, and country.
  • Corresponding author: Full name, complete address, and email address.

Main Manuscript

  • Abstract

A structured abstract in English of 250 words should be provided and divided into the following sections:

    • Background
    • Objective(s)
    • Methods
    • Result(s)
    • Conclusion
  • Keywords

Please provide 3 to 5 keywords or short phrases in alphabetical order separated by semicolons (;). The use of keywords taken in the MeSH list of the U.S. NLM at the following uniform resource locator (URL) is preferred (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html).

  • Main sections
    • Original Articles and Short Communications: i) Introduction, including the objective (s) of works, ii) Materials and Methods, which should include all essential elements necessary to allow replication of the experiment and interpretations, as well as ethical approval (if any), iii) Results, iv) Discussion, and v) Conclusions
    • Review Articles and Case Reports: appropriate headings and subheadings.
  • Tables
    • Tables in the main manuscript document should be provided as text, not as an image.
    • Each table should include the table title, appropriate column heads, and legends.
    • Tables should be self-explanatory and should not duplicate the textual materials.
    • Tables should be cited in numeric order (e.g. Table 1, Table 2) and indicate the insertion point after the paragraph where it is first cited. Do not insert tables in the main manuscript.
    • Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lowercase letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data) and included beneath the table body.
    • Abbreviations used in the table must be defined in a footnote to the table.
    • Identify any previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference at the end of the table heading.
  • Figures
    • Figures should be cited in numeric order (e.g. Fig. 1, Fig. 2) and indicate the insertion point after the paragraph where it is first cited. Do not insert figures in the main manuscript.
    • Figures provided during submission must have sufficiently high resolution (minimum 1000 pixels width/height, or a resolution of 300 dpi or higher).
    • TIFF, JPEG, EPS, and PDF formats are preferred.
    • Diagrams with describing words (e.g. flow chart, coordinate diagram, bar chart, line chart, scatter diagram, etc.) should be editable in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint format.
    • For figures with multiple parts, each part should be denoted by capital letters (A, B, C, etc.).
    • Symbols and abbreviations must be defined in the figure or its legend.
    • Figure titles and legends should be provided in the main manuscript, not in the graphic file.
    • Identify previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference citation at the end of the figure legends.
    • In case the face of a patient is visibly recognizable, the patient’s consent must be obtained.
  • References

List the references in consecutive, numerical order, as they are cited in the text. Use Vancouver Style. If the list of authors exceeds 6, the first 6 authors follow by et al should be listed for those references. Abbreviations for journal names should conform to those used in MEDLINE.

Example of references:

Journal articles
1. Porntaveetus T, Theerapanon T, Srichomthong C, Shotelersuk V. Cole-Carpenter syndrome in a patient from Thailand. Am J Med Genet A 2018;176:1706-10.
2. Udomsinprasert W, Kitkumthorn N, Mutirangura A, Chongsrisawat V, Poovorawan Y, Honsawek S. Global methylation, oxidative stress, and relative telomere length in biliary atresia patients. Sci Rep 2016;6:26969.

Book
1. Dooley J, Lok A, Garcia-Tsao G, Pinzani M. Sherlock’s Diseases of the Liver and Biliary System. 13th ed. London: WILEY Blackwell; 2018. p.72-95.
2. Bass HW. Chromosomes. In: Krebs JE, Goldstein ES, Kilpatrick ST, eds. Lewin’s GENES XII. 12th ed. Burlington: Jones & Bartlett Learning; 2018. p.161-87

Electronic article
1. Annas GJ. Resurrection of a stem-cell funding barrier-Dickey-Wicker in count. N Engl J Med [Internet]. 2010 [cited 2011 Jun 15];363:1687-9. Available from: http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp1010466 

Authorship Criteria and Contributions 

All listed authors should have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript.

All authors of accepted articles must sign and authorship from affirming that they have met all three of the following criteria for authorship, thereby accepting public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content:

  1. Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data.
  2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
  3. Approval of the version to be published and all subsequent versions.

Individuals who do not meet the criteria for authorship but who have made substantial, direct contributions to the work (e.g. purely technical help, writing assistance, general or financial or material support) should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgment section of the manuscript, with a brief description of their contributions. Authors should obtain written permission from anyone they wish to list in the Acknowledgment section.

Conflicts of Interest Statement

Please ensure that the initials of each author listed in your manuscript appear in the Conflicts of interest statement. If no authors have any potential conflict of interest, then it may be sufficient to state “The authors have each completed the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Form for uniform Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest. No authors have any potential conflict of interest to disclose/None of the authors disclose any potential conflict of interest.

Ethical Policies

Institutional review boards 

For investigations involving human participants or data, or human material samples, or animal studies or samples, approval of the appropriate institutional ethics review board (IRB) or ethics committee is required, and such approval must be stated in the Methods section of the manuscript naming the ethics review board/committee and the approval number.

For work involving animals, including vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates, full compliance with local, national, and international regulations is necessary, and the protocols must be reviewed in advance by the relevant IRB for the care and use of laboratory animals. Procedures involving any animals are to be undertaken only with the goal of advancing scientific knowledge and with the explicit approval of an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) before they begin.

Informed Consent

It is necessary for authors to ensure that the anonymity of patients is carefully protected. The names, initials, hospital or national identity numbers, or dates of birth of patients and research subjects should not be used. Other personal or identifying information should not be used unless it is essential to the clinical message or scientific purpose of the article and the patient (or parent, or legally authorized guardian or representative for minors or incapacitated adults) gives written informed consent for publication. A signed statement of informed consent to publish (in print and online) patient descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees should be obtained from all persons (or parents, or legally authorized guardians or representatives) who can be identified in such written descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees (including by the patients themselves). Even where consent has been given, identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. All authors are required to follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) requirements on privacy and informed consent from patients and study participants.

Publication Malpractice Statement

Author must not simultaneously submit their manuscripts to author publication if that manuscript is under consideration by any other journals.

Redundant or duplicate publication is a paper that overlaps substantially with one already published in print or electronic media. At the time of manuscript submission, authors must inform the editor about all submission and previous publications that might be regard as redundant or duplicate publication of the same or very similar work. Any such publication must be referred to and referenced in the new paper.

The Editors of Chulalongkorn Medical Journal adhere to principles of research integrity and aim to avoid any type of scientific misconduct, such as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, redundant publication, or authorship problems. All submitted manuscripts are checked for potential plagiarism of all types, including patchwork plagiarism and text recycling, using specialist services including those from iThenticate, Crossref, and ProQuest, and are reviewed by an editor responsible for publication integrity.

Chulalongkorn Medical Journal follows international standards, guidelines, and flowcharts provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (http://publicationethics.org/resources), the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) (http://www.wame.org/about/recommendations-on-publicationethics-policie), and the Council of Science Editors (http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/resource-library/editorialpolicies/). We follow the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (a joint statement by COPE, the Directory of Open Access Journals [DOAJ], WAME, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association [OASPA]; https://doaj.org/bestpractice).

Copyright and Licensing

All manuscripts submitted for publication must be assigned copyright to Chulalongkorn Medical Journal. Reproduction, whether in whole or in part, requires written approval from Chulalongkorn Medical Journal. The author is responsible for the content of their articles, except for errors incurred during the printing process. All articles published in the Chulalongkorn Medical Journal are under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, which permits others to distribute the work, provided that the article is not altered or used commercially. It is not required to obtain permission to distribute the article but to provide credit for the author and journal.