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Research note

Criteria

Anatomy of a Research NoteResearch note is the main article type of BMC Research Notes and is suitable for

  • Extensions or updates to previously published research
  • The reporting of additional controls 
  • Short descriptions of research projects that did not provide publishable results but represent valuable information regarding protocol and data collection
  • Additions to established (software) tools and experimental or computational methods, e.g. new functionality of user interface, improvements in performance or the release on a new platform
  • Replication studies
  • Null results
  • Data management plans

Authors must clearly acknowledge any work upon which they are building, both published and unpublished. 

Manuscripts reporting results of a clinical trial must conform to CONSORT 2010 guidelines. Authors of randomized controlled trials should submit a completed CONSORT checklist alongside their manuscript, available at www.consort-statement.org.

Please note that pooled analyses of selected published research and bibliometric analyses will not be considered. Studies reporting descriptive results from a single institution or region will only be considered if analogous data have not been previously published in a peer reviewed journal and the conclusions provide distinct insights that are of relevance to a regional or international audience.

BMC Research Notes does not consider systematic reviews or meta-analyses. These should be published as full research articles in one of our BMC Series sister journals. 
Additional criteria apply if your manuscript describes a software tool or data management plan. Please click on the respective link below to view these. These manuscripts should be submitted as a research note.

Image integrity and standards
Cropped gels and blots can be included in the main text if it improves the clarity and conciseness of the presentation. In such cases, the cropping of the blot must be clearly evident and must be mentioned in the figure legend. Corresponding uncropped full-length gels and blot must be included in the supplementary files. These uncropped images should indicate where they were cropped, be labelled as in the main text and placed in a single supplementary figure. The manuscript's figure legends should state that 'Full-length blots/gels are presented in Supplementary Figure X'. Further information can be found under 'Digital image integrity' which are detailed on our Standards of Reporting page.

Data sharing
BMC Research Notes strongly supports open research, including transparency and openness in reporting. Further details of our Data availability policy can be found on the journal's About page.

BMC Research Notes 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 whenever possible. Please see Springer Nature’s data repository guidance. Where a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories exists, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory. A list of data where deposition is required, with the appropriate repositories, can be found on the Editorial Policies Page.

Authors who need help depositing data may wish to contact our Research Data Support Helpdesk. The use of the service is optional and does not imply or guarantee that a manuscript will be accepted.

Preparing your manuscript

The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and the information required within each section. For a one-page summary of what a research note article should look like, please click here.

Please ensure you adhere to the word limits for research notes:

  • Abstract: 200 words
  • Introduction, main text and limitations together: 2000 words

List of abbreviation, declarations, references, figures, figure headings, figure legends, tables, table headings and table legends do not count towards the above stated word limits.

Please note that your manuscript must include a ‘Declarations’ section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information). 
For all research involving human subjects, written informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16). BMC Research Notes does not consider research where only verbal informed consent has been obtained.

Please limit the number of tables and figures in your manuscript to 3 in order to be consistent with a note article type. Additional figures and/or tables can be included as supplementary files.

Title page

The title page should:

  • Present a title that includes a clear description of what the manuscript reports
  • List the full names, institutional addresses and email addresses for all authors
    • If a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
  • Indicate the corresponding author

Abstract

The abstract should not exceed 200 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

  • Objective: The purpose and objective of the research presented.
  • Results: A brief summary of the main findings.

If the data presented is a single observation or the side product of another research project then authors should state this in the abstract under objective.

Professionally produced Visual Abstracts
BMC Research Notes will consider visual abstracts. As an author submitting to the journal, you may wish to make use of services provided at Springer Nature for high quality and affordable visual abstracts where you are entitled to a 20% discount. Click here to find out more about the service, and your discount will be automatically be applied when using this link.

Keywords

Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

Introduction

The introduction should be brief and provide the motivation/objective for the work presented in the manuscript, e.g.

  • Where does the data come from?
  • Why was the data obtained?

If the data presented is a single observation or the side product of another research project then authors should state this in the introduction. This will not negatively impact editorial assessment as BMC Research Notes aims to make single observations available to the scientific community.

We are not looking for a detailed and lengthy introduction to the topic and authors should instead cite relevant review articles. Authors should not provide a general review of the related literature but instead cite relevant work if the manuscript extends previously published or unpublished research.

For data management plans, the introduction should briefly summarize the research project for which the data management plan was written.

Main text

This should contain the body of the research note, and may also be broken into subsections with short and informative headings. Methods should be described in sufficient detail to allow repeatability. Authors should concisely describe the data or results they present and provide a critical discussion of the findings within the context of the research field. If an observation cannot be explained or put in context of the current literature then authors are encouraged to state that.

Limitations

BMC Research Notes considers scientifically valid manuscripts irrespective of the interest of a study or its likely impact. In order to ensure submissions to BMC Research Notes are of maximum benefit to the research community, authors should clearly state the limitations of their work.

Introduction, main text and limitations together must not exceed 2000 words.

List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections under the heading 'Declarations':

  • Ethics approval and consent to participate
  • Consent for publication
  • Availability of data and materials
  • Competing interests
  • Funding
  • Authors' contributions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Authors' information (optional)

Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

If any of the sections are not relevant to your manuscript, please include the heading and write 'Not applicable' for that section. 

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

  • include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)
  • include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate

Studies involving animals must include a statement on ethics approval and for experimental studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also include a statement on informed consent from the client or owner.

See our editorial policies for more information.

If your manuscript does not report on or involve the use of any animal or human data or tissue, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Consent for publication

If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

You can use your institutional consent form or our consent form if you prefer. You should not send the form to us on submission, but we may request to see a copy at any stage (including after publication).

See our editorial policies for more information on consent for publication.

If your manuscript does not contain data from any individual person, please state “Not applicable” in this section.

Availability of data and materials

All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Authors are also encouraged to preserve search strings on searchRxiv https://searchrxiv.org/, an archive to support researchers to report, store and share their searches consistently and to enable them to review and re-use existing searches. searchRxiv enables researchers to obtain a digital object identifier (DOI) for their search, allowing it to be cited. 

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
  • The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
  • The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  • Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
  • The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].
  • Not applicable. If your manuscript does not contain any data, please state 'Not applicable' in this section.

More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available here.

BioMed Central strongly encourages the citation of any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:


Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. http://0-dx-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.6084/m9.figshare.853801

With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].[Reference number] 

If you wish to co-submit a data note describing your data to be published in BMC Research Notes, you can do so by visiting our submission portal. Data notes support open data and help authors to comply with funder policies on data sharing. Co-published data notes will be linked to the research article the data support (example).

Competing interests

All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared in this section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of competing interests. If you are unsure whether you or any of your co-authors have a competing interest please contact the editorial office.

Please use the authors initials to refer to each authors' competing interests in this section.

If you do not have any competing interests, please state "The authors declare that they have no competing interests" in this section.

Funding

All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared. If the funder has a specific role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, this should be declared.

Authors' contributions

The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section. Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in our editorial policies.

Please use initials to refer to each author's contribution in this section, for example: "FC analyzed and interpreted the patient data regarding the hematological disease and the transplant. RH performed the histological examination of the kidney, and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript."

Acknowledgements

Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the article who does not meet the criteria for authorship including anyone who provided professional writing services or materials.

Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

See our editorial policies for a full explanation of acknowledgements and authorship criteria.

If you do not have anyone to acknowledge, please write "Not applicable" in this section.

Group authorship (for manuscripts involving a collaboration group): if you would like the names of the individual members of a collaboration Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please ensure that the title of the collaboration Group is included on the title page and in the submission system and also include collaborating author names as the last paragraph of the “Acknowledgements” section. Please add authors in the format First Name, Middle initial(s) (optional), Last Name. You can add institution or country information for each author if you wish, but this should be consistent across all authors.

Please note that individual names may not be present in the PubMed record at the time a published article is initially included in PubMed as it takes PubMed additional time to code this information.

Authors' information

This section is optional.

You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader's interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.

Footnotes

Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

References

Examples of the Vancouver reference style are shown below.

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice

Web links and URLs: All web links and URLs, including links to the authors' own websites, should be given a reference number and included in the reference list rather than within the text of the manuscript. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, as well as the date the site was accessed, in the following format: The Mouse Tumor Biology Database. http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do. Accessed 20 May 2013. If an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs, then they should be included in the reference.

Example reference style:

Article within a journal

Smith JJ. The world of science. Am J Sci. 1999;36:234-5.

Article within a journal (no page numbers)

Rohrmann S, Overvad K, Bueno-de-Mesquita HB, Jakobsen MU, Egeberg R, Tjønneland A, et al. Meat consumption and mortality - results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. BMC Medicine. 2013;11:63.

Article within a journal by DOI

Slifka MK, Whitton JL. Clinical implications of dysregulated cytokine production. Dig J Mol Med. 2000; doi:10.1007/s801090000086.

Article within a journal supplement

Frumin AM, Nussbaum J, Esposito M. Functional asplenia: demonstration of splenic activity by bone marrow scan. Blood 1979;59 Suppl 1:26-32.

Book chapter, or an article within a book

Wyllie AH, Kerr JFR, Currie AR. Cell death: the significance of apoptosis. In: Bourne GH, Danielli JF, Jeon KW, editors. International review of cytology. London: Academic; 1980. p. 251-306.

OnlineFirst chapter in a series (without a volume designation but with a DOI)

Saito Y, Hyuga H. Rate equation approaches to amplification of enantiomeric excess and chiral symmetry breaking. Top Curr Chem. 2007. doi:10.1007/128_2006_108.

Complete book, authored

Blenkinsopp A, Paxton P. Symptoms in the pharmacy: a guide to the management of common illness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science; 1998.

Online document

Doe J. Title of subordinate document. In: The dictionary of substances and their effects. Royal Society of Chemistry. 1999. http://0-www-rsc-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/dose/title of subordinate document. Accessed 15 Jan 1999.

Online database

Healthwise Knowledgebase. US Pharmacopeia, Rockville. 1998. http://www.healthwise.org. Accessed 21 Sept 1998.

Supplementary material/private homepage

Doe J. Title of supplementary material. 2000. http://www.privatehomepage.com. Accessed 22 Feb 2000.

University site

Doe, J: Title of preprint. http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/mydata.html (1999). Accessed 25 Dec 1999.

FTP site

Doe, J: Trivial HTTP, RFC2169. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2169.txt (1999). Accessed 12 Nov 1999.

Organization site

ISSN International Centre: The ISSN register. http://www.issn.org (2006). Accessed 20 Feb 2007.

Dataset with persistent identifier

Zheng L-Y, Guo X-S, He B, Sun L-J, Peng Y, Dong S-S, et al. Genome data from sweet and grain sorghum (Sorghum bicolor). GigaScience Database. 2011. http://0-dx-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.5524/100012.

Figures, tables and additional files

See General formatting guidelines for information on how to format figures, tables and additional files.

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