Guide to Authors

Welcome to the electronic manuscript submission website for Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases. The instructions below are structured so you can quickly and easily answer the following questions:

1. Is my manuscript suitable for Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases? (Scope + Editorial Note)
2. How do I format my manuscript for Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases? (Format of Papers)
3. How do I submit my manuscript to Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases? (Submission of Papers)

OTHER LINKS

• About the journal
• Format of papers
• Preparation of Original Articles
• House style
• Submission of papers
• Editorial policy
• Ethics and bioethics
• Peer review policy
• Corrections
• About npg online services

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Scope

Topics Covered
The journal reports on exciting new developments being made in diagnosis, surgery, radiotherapy, drug discovery and medical management.

Editors	Roger S Kirby, London, UK Judd W Moul, Durham, NC, US
Frequency	4 issues a year
Abstracted in	Excerpta Medica/EMBASE Current Contents Research Alert Science Citation Index SCIExpanded Index Medicus/Medline SciSearch UK Health Centre Index

Editorial Note

FORMAT OF PAPERS

Article Type	Description	Word Count
Original Article	These should follow the structure outlined below	Total length of your paper must not exceed 3000 typewritten words which includes a 50-100 word abstract and 3-6 keywords. This word count does not include figures or tables. Original articles should contain no more than 50 references. Any text beyond the limit can be published as online-only supplementary material if you feel that it is necessary (see instructions below on supplementary material)
Review	These should clearly indicate how conclusions are drawn from the data	Total length of your paper must not exceed 4000-4500 typewritten words which includes a 50-100 word abstract and 3-6 keywords. The word count does not include figures and tables. Authors may use as many figures and/or tables as needed to convey the meaning of the article. Review articles should contain no more than 100 references.

Preparation of Original Articles

Abstract and Keywords
The abstract should not exceed 200 words and three to six keywords should be included to aid web searches after publication.

References
Manuscripts should have no more than 50 references. Only references directly related to the article should be cited and exhaustive lists should be avoided.

References should follow the Vancouver format. In the text they should appear as numbers starting at one and at the end of the paper they should be listed (double-spaced) in numerical order corresponding to the order of citation in the text. All authors should be quoted for papers with up to six authors; for papers with more than six authors, the first six only should be quoted, followed by et al. Abbreviations for titles of medical periodicals should conform to those used in the latest edition of Index Medicus. The first and last page numbers for each reference should be provided. Abstracts and letters must be identified as such. Papers in press and papers already submitted for publication may be included in the list of references but no citation is required for work that is not yet submitted for publication.

Journal article, up to six authors:
1 Reiter RE, Gu Z, Watabe T, Thomas G, Szigeti K, Davis E et al. Prostate stem cell antigen: a cell surface marker overexpressed in prostate cancer. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1998; 95: 1735–1740.

Journal article, e-pub ahead of print:
2 Glendenning J, Khoo V. Sweet's syndrome in prostate cancer. Prostate Cancer Prostatic Dis 2008; e-pub ahead of print 29 January 2008; doi:10.1038/sj.pcan.4501029.

Journal article, in press:
3 Kao PF, Chou YH, Lai CW. Diffuse FDG uptake in acute prostatitis. Clin Nucl Med (in press).

Complete book:
4 Burnet FM. Immunological Surveillance. Pergamon Press: Oxford, UK, 1970.

Chapter in book:
5 Denmeade SR, Isaacs JT. Activation of programmed (apoptotic) cell death for the treatment of prostate cancer. In: August JT, Anders MW, Murad F, Coyle JT (eds). Advances in Pharmacology, vol. 35. Academic Press: London, 1996, pp 281–306.

Abstract:
6 Lennon S, Strong A. Wnt signaling and cancer development: therapeutic implications. Neoplasma 2006; 53(Suppl 1): 123 (abstract 456).

Letter to the Editor:
7 Braillon A. Re: is a screening interval of every 4 years for prostate cancer acceptable? [letter]. J Natl Cancer Inst 2008; 100: 222–223.

EndNote users should select the Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases output style for the correct reference style.

Personal communications must be allocated a number and included in the list of references in the usual way or simply referred to in the text; the authors may choose which method to use. In either case authors must obtain permission from the individual concerned to quote his/her unpublished work.

House Style

Abbreviations and Symbols
These must be standard and SI units used throughout. The following abbreviations are approved: ACE-Angiotensin-converting-enzyme; PRA-Plasma renin activity; PRC-Plasma renin concentration; BP-Blood pressure; SBP-Systolic blood pressure; DBP-Diastolic blood pressure; MAP-Mean arterial pressure; RAS-Renal artery stenosis; RAA System - Renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system and ANP-Arterial natriuretic peptide. Acronyms should be used sparingly and must be fully explained when first used. Whenever possible drugs should be given their approved generic name. Where a proprietary (brand) name must be used, it should begin with a capital letter. Statistical analyses must explain the methods used. The use of footnotes is not permitted. Single quotation marks should be used and words to be italicised should be underlined.

Patient Anonymity, Informed Consent and Animal Welfare
It is the author’s responsibility to ensure that a patient’s anonymity is carefully protected. Authors should remove patients’ identifying information from figures unless they obtain written consent and submit this documentation with the manuscript. When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) or with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 1983. In cases where a study involves the use of live animals, the manuscript should include a statement that all experiments were performed in compliance with relevant laws and institutional guidelines.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Upon submission of an original research paper, authors can indicate within the manuscript tracking system whether they wish to pay a one off fee to allow their article to become freely available immediately upon publication. The fee is £2,000/$3,000/€2,400 (plus VAT where applicable) and can be paid via credit card or by requesting an invoice be raised.

By paying this fee authors are permitted to post the final, published, pdf of their article on a website, institutional repository or other free public server immediately on publication.

Upon acceptance, authors must fill out and send back a payment form. This is mandatory and failure to send in the payment form along with the Licence to Publish form will result in the article being published as a standard paper behind access control. The licence to publish form has been amended to offer authors the choice of which licence to use on their paper and these choices are described below:

The first is the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Licence and allows readers to download the article and share it with others as long as they mention the author and link back to the original article. The article cannot be changed in any way or used commercially.

The second is the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence and allows readers to alter, transform, or build upon the article and then distribute the resulting work under the same or similar license to this one. The work must be attributed back to the original author and commercial use is not permitted.

For further information please see the Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases Open FAQs and payment form.

Colour charges

Further information
To find out who to contact for advertising, subscriptions, permissions, papers in production or publishing a supplement, please visit our publisher’s contacts page. Alternatively, you can write to: Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases, Nature Publishing Group, The Macmillan Building, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, UK.

EDITORIAL POLICY

Statement of Ethics

Peer-review policy

Correction and retraction process

Non-Native Speakers of English
Researchers who are not native speakers of English who submit manuscripts to international journals sometimes receive negative comments from referees or editors about the English-language usage in their manuscripts, and these problems can contribute to a decision to reject a paper. To help reduce the possibility of such problems, we strongly encourage such authors to take at least one of the following steps:

• Have your manuscript reviewed for clarity by a colleague whose native language is English.
• Use one of the many English language editing services that are available, such as that offered by Nature Publishing Group Language Editing. An editor will improve the English to ensure that your meaning is clear and to identify problems that require your review.

Please note that the use of Nature Publishing Group Language Editing is at the author's own expense and in no way implies that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted by an NPG journal (or any other journal). The decisions that the editors of any NPG journal make based on the quality and suitability of a manuscript for that journal are entirely independent of whether that manuscript has been language-edited by Nature Publishing Group Language Editing.

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