Submissions

Author Guidelines

1. Cover Letter
The cover letter is an excellent opportunity to briefly discuss the importance of the submitted work and why it is appropriate for the journal. Please avoid repeating information that is already present in the abstract and introduction. The cover letter is not shared with the referees and should be used to provide confidential information such as conflicts of interest and to declare any related work that is in press or submitted elsewhere.

2. Main Manuscript
MSACM is flexible regarding the format of initial submission. Within reason, style and length, will not influence the consideration of a manuscript. If revisions are requested, the editor will provide detailed formatting instruction at that time.
To facilitate the review process, we strongly encourage authors to incorporate the manuscript text AND figures into a single Word file. Suitably high-resolution figures may be inserted within the text at appropriate positions. Each figure legend should be presented on the same page as its figure. Please number all lines in your Word document. We accept LaTeX files at the acceptance stage.

2.1 Title
Titles must be on two lines in print (approx. 75 characters, including spaces) and should avoid technical terms, abbreviations and active verbs.

2.2 Authors
Corresponding author(s) should be labelled with an asterisk (*). See Section 3 for more details.

2.3 Abstract
Provide a general introduction to the topic and a brief non-technical summary of your main results and their implication. For articles, the abstract contains approximately 150-200 words, unreferenced.

2.4 Main Text
The main text should not contain more than 3500 words and 6 display items (figures, tables); should contain approximately 40 references (however subject to type of article e.g. research article, review etc). Section headings should be used and subheadings may appear in ‘Results’. In-text citations should be included wherever necessary.

2.5 Methods
The Methods section should contain all elements necessary for interpretation and replication of the results. Methods should be written as concisely as possible and typically do not exceed 3000 words but may be longer if necessary. Methods-only references do not count against your reference limit.

2.6 References
These may only contain citations and should list only one publication with each number. Include the title of the cited article or dataset. All articles submitted to MSACM must use the Vancouver referencing style. We encourage authors to use accepted reference management software e.g. EndNote and submit a complete library of references in the metadata section.

2.7 Acknowledgments (optional)
Keep acknowledgements brief and do not include thanks to anonymous referees or editors, or effusive comments. Grant or contribution numbers may be included.

2.8 Author contributions
You must include a statement that specifies the individual contributions of each co-author.

2.9 Conflict of Interest
The author must provide authorized evidence of no-conflict with any funding body or persons that might influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All authors, members, reviewers and editors must disclose any association that poses a conflict of interest in connection with the manuscript. The corresponding author will be asked to sign a form behalf of all the authors involved regarding potential conflicts of interest at the time of acceptance.

2.10 Materials and Correspondence
Indicate the author to whom correspondence and material requests should be addressed.

2.11 Tables
Each table should be accompanied by a short title sentence describing what the table shows. Further details can be included as footnotes to the table.

2.12 Figures
We prefer the images to be included as part of the manuscript text i.e. a single Word document at initial submission; but if necessary, supply separate image files or deposit image data in a suitable repository (e.g. FigShare) for this purpose. If your manuscript is accepted, you will receive more extensive instructions for final submission of display items. However, some guidelines for final figure preparation are included below and here if you wish to minimize later revisions and possible delays.

• Provide images in RGB colour and at 600 dpi or higher resolution
• Use the same typeface for all figures. Use symbol font for Greek letters
• Use distinct colours with comparable visibility and avoid the use of red and green for contrast. Recoloring primary data, such as fluorescence images, to colour-safe combinations such as green and magenta or other accessible colour palettes, is strongly encouraged. Use of the rainbow colour scale should be avoided.

Figure legends of <250 words each should begin with a brief title sentence for the whole figure and continue with a short statement of what is depicted in the figure, not the results (or data) of the experiment or the methods used. Legends should be detailed enough so that each figure and caption can, as far as possible, be understood in isolation from the main text.

2.13 Statistical Information
The Methods Section must include a statistics section where you describe the statistical tests used and whether they were one- or two-tailed. Please ensure that the error bars are defined in all of the figures. For all statistics (including error bars), provide the EXACT n values used to calculate the statistics (reporting individual values rather than a range if n varied among experiments). For representative results, report the number of times that the measurements were repeated. Where relevant, provide exact values for both significant and non-significant P values. For ANOVAs, provide F values and degrees of freedom. For t-tests, provide t-values and degrees of freedom. Please specifically define the replicates.

3. Corresponding Author and Lead Contact
We prefer that each article submitted have a single corresponding author because ownership and responsibility that are inherent in the corresponding authorship will promote best practices in design and performance of experiments, analysis of results, organization and retention of original data, and preparation of figures and text. However, for some studies, multiple authors may bear the responsibilities of a corresponding author. If you have compelling reasons, you may include additional corresponding authors. We may ask you to explain your rationale and to verify that all corresponding authors understand their responsibilities (listed below). We ask that you describe each corresponding author’s specific contributions in the Author Contributions section.

The lead contact is the corresponding author who is also responsible for communicating with the journal (before and after publication) and accountable for fulfilling requests for reagents and resources and for arbitrating decisions and disputes. For research papers with multiple corresponding authors, please designate only one corresponding author as the lead contact. If there is only one corresponding author, then that author is automatically also the lead contact. You should denote the lead contact with a footnote in the author list.

3.1 Responsibilities of the corresponding author and lead contact
All corresponding authors bear responsibilities 1-8 below; the lead contact additionally bears responsibility 9.

1. Supervising the work
2. Being responsible for all data, figures, and text
3. Ensuring that authorship is granted appropriately to contributors
4. Ensuring that all authors approve the content and submission of the paper
5. Ensuring adherence to all editorial and submission policies
6. Identifying and declaring conflicts of interest on behalf of all authors
7. Identifying and disclosing related work by any co-authors under consideration elsewhere
8. Archiving unprocessed data and ensuring that figures accurately present the original data
9. Communicating with the journal (before and after publication), being accountable for fulfilling requests for reagents and resources, and arbitrating decisions and disputes

4. Language
All submissions must be written in English (both British and American versions are accepted), however, it is the author’s responsibility to ensure constant use of either in their manuscript. SI units should be used. Should the author submit a non-English manuscript (e.g. written in Mandarin Chinese), we would require the author to translate the manuscript prior to submission and submit both versions of the manuscript.

5. Plagiarism
We strictly reject any form of plagiarism. iThenticate will be utilized to verify the originality of all submissions. If severe plagiarism is detected during the review process, the manuscript will be immediately rejected with or without notice. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure proper usage of citations and references.