Information for authors

The Journal of Investigative Dermatology publishes papers describing original research relevant to all aspects of cutaneous biology and skin disease.

The spectrum of interest is indicated by the breadth of the editorial staff and includes biochemistry, biophysics, carcinogenesis, cellular growth and regulation, clinical research, development, epidemiology, extracellular matrix, genetics, immunology, melanocyte biology, microbiology, molecular biology, pathology, pharmacology and percutaneous absorption, photobiology, physiology, and structure. Review articles and letters to the editor are a standard feature. Methods papers are eligible for publication if they are judged to describe important techniques of general interest to readers.

Policies

Nonproprietary unique reagents described (e.g. cells, antibodies, DNA) are made available to qualified scientists when feasible.
All data, text, figures,and tables must be original and must not be published or submitted for publication elsewhere.
Authors should indicate in a cover letter whether they have financial, equity, patenting, or other relevant relationships or arrangements with a productor sponsor of research that might constitute a conflict of interest.
Sources of support should be indicated in the Acknowledgments section.

Procedure for submission of manuscripts

1. Manuscripts must be in English.
2. Submit four complete copies of both the manuscript and all illustrative material.
3. The entire manuscript, including references, should be double spaced with margins of at least 1 in. (2.5 cm.).
4. An accompanying cover letter should indicate the address, telephone,and fax numbers of the corresponding author. Authors may suggest referees, but please supply full names, addresses,and phone and fax numbers).
5. The copyright agreement must be signed by all authors.
6. Submission of the final manuscript on disk, (after acceptance), is required; see January and July issues for specific information about submission of electronic files.

Page Charges

The Journal does not make the payment of page charges a condition for the acceptance of a manuscript for publication. The authors will be assessed $35 per printed page, but in extraordinary cases, upon appeal by the author, the editors may waive the assessment.

Submission of DNA sequences

Sequences must have an EMBL or Genbank database accession number, and this number should be given in the legend to the figure showing the sequence.

Organization and General Information

Manuscripts must be concise, organized and formatted as described here and appropriately economical of text, references, figures, and tables. Manuscripts of inappropriate length or format or with too many figures and tables may be returned for shortening. See a recent issue for appropriate format.

Title Page
Introduction
Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion
Acknowledgements
References
Tables
Legends for Figures
Footnotes

Also note that:

Shorter papers may combine Results and Discussion.
All pages should be numbered consecutively starting with the title page as page one.
Do not use headings for one or a few sentences; rather, consolidate paragraphs and headings under Methods and under Results.
When data and error are provided in the text of the manuscript, give the number followed by "mean +/- SEM" or " mean +/- SD)."
Text, Tables, and Figures should be concise in order to save space.
Include a word count for the entire manuscript in the cover letter. Note that the Journal pages average 1200 words.
Do not submit tables or figures showing data not bearing on the main thrust of the manuscriptor without statistically significant differences; instead, state tangentially related or pertinent negative results in the text.
In general, statistical treatment of multiple experiments is required and is preferred to representative experiments; we prefer to see the standard deviation (abbreviated"SD") unless sets of data from experiments or groups are pooled, in which case the standard error of the mean (abbreviated "SEM") may be used.
If SEM is used, the number of observations in each data point should be given. Do not use the abbreviation "SE".
DNA sequences
Color Art
Page Charges

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Title Page

Provide a brief, informative, not descriptive, title . List the title of the manuscript, authors (including full first names), department(s), institution(s), city, state, and nation in which the work was done. Do not include the academic degrees of authors. Indicate the authors' affiliations with symbols placed after the authors' names and before the institutions, e.g. M.D., PhD., etc. Include the name and address and fax and phone numbers of the corresponding author; this person will receive correspondence, page proofs, and invoices for page charges and reprints. A short title of not more than 45 spaces including blank spaces must be furnished. Include a list of abbreviations. Authors may include up to four keywords not in the title for abstracting. Acknowledge grant or other financial support elsewhere, under "Acknowledgments. " (see above under "Organization.") Too many abbreviations make reading difficult. Abbreviations should not be used for common language or for phrases used less than five times and should conform to those listed in Council of Biology Editors Style Manual, now known as Science Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers sixth edition; other terms used five or more times may be abbreviated and should be listed with their abbreviations on the title page. Capitalize trade names, but use generic names if possible. For names of chemicals, the trivial name may be used if the formal chemical name is given with the first use of the trivial name.

Introduction

The abstract should summarize the background, purpose, results, and conclusions of the study in that order, but without headings, in 250 words or less. Since the abstract will be used by abstracting journals, it must be concise and self-explanatory and should not include nonstandard abbreviations, footnotes, acknowledgements of support, or references. Keep abbreviations in the abstract to a minimum.

Footnotes

Footnotes should be listed consecutively at the foot of the page on which they fall, designated by superscript symbols (e.g...skin".1)#, ¶ , , , *). Note that abstracts or unpublished works referred to must be given either as footnotes or in parentheses in the text of the manuscript, not in the reference list.

Materials and Methods, Results, and Discussion

Readers should be able to reproduce the experiments from the information supplied in the methods section, figures, legends and table footnotes, and references. Figure legends should describe the experiment and identify parts of the figure. Interpretation belongs in the text of Results rather than in the figure legends. The Discussion should not repeat information in the Results section.

References

References should be typed on a separate sheet and listed alphabetically , not by order of appearance as in the past. Refer to publications in the text of the article as e.g. "(Schmidt and Jones, 1989)", or as "(Schmidt et al, 1990)" in the case of three or more authors. If you prefer to number the references, the numbers must refer to the alphabetized list, not to the order of appearance in the text as in the past. Citations numbered in the text should be enclosed within brackets. Papers in press may be included in the references with the title of publication and the journal name, but unpublished citations such as theses, "personal communication," "in preparation," etc. should be given in parentheses in the text. In the list of references, give all authors. In the case of multiple authors, all names should be listed; do not use "et al". The style of references and abbreviations of journal names must conform to those adopted by the Index Medicus and must show inclusive page numbers. The names of unlisted journals should be spelled out. For specific examples refer to articles in theJournal. Only full-length published papers or manuscripts in press should be cited in the references; abstracts are not cited in the references but may be listed as footnotes in standard reference format or may be cited in the text in parentheses by authors, journal, page, and date. Abstracts should be followed by the designation "(abst.)."

Legends for Figures

One page of illustrations and legends will be allowed for about three pages of text. Submit four sets of glossy prints or laser-printed figures if appropriate, unmounted and sorted so that each complete set of figures is contained in a separate envelope. To avoid size reduction, authors should submit art work of exact column measurements and crop out unnecessary areas. On the back of each illustration indicate: (1) the top of the illustration, (2) the number of the illustration, and (3) the name of the first author. Figures should be numbered in the order of appearance. Parts of the figure such as a, b, etc. should be labeled on the figure in small lower case letters but the title should be given in legend, not on the figure. Do not use 3-dimensional graphs unless the third dimension is used for data. Label axes parallel to the axis, not at the top of the graph. Do not place borders around figures. Legends should explain how an experiment was done and identify parts of the figure, not interpret the figure. Legends should be submitted together on a separate sheet double spaced in the following form: Figure 1. A short informative title stating the point or result of the figure. Use informative, not descriptive titles, indicating the meaning of the data shown. Then, indicate how the experiment was performed to the extent that such information is not given in the Methods section, avoiding redundancy. Readers should be able to reproduce the work from the description in the legend combined with the Methods and References. Next, indicate the meaning of all symbols, keys, and abbreviations used in the figure. Except for photomicrographs, interpretive text should be placed in the text of the manuscript rather than in the figure legends. A scale bar, not magnification, must be placedon micrographs and the scale indicated in the legend, e.g., "scalebar = 5 m." Error bars should be defined in the figure legend as "mean SD," or "mean SEM" (Do not use "SE").

For better quality reproduction of halftone images, authors may submit reviewers' copies of art work at the initial submission and then submit original art work after acceptance for publication; oversize original art work will be reduced. Although reviewers'copies of art work for accepted manuscripts will not be returned, original art work will be returned at the authors' request.

Tables

Provide informative, not descriptive, titles. Do not provide a table legend, but supply information in footnotes to the title and table contents. Table number (in Roman numerals) should follow the sequence of citation in the text, and a title must be supplied. Tell what experiment was performed and how, and give the definition of columns or abbreviations etc. as footnotes to the tables designated by superscript italic letters: a ,b, c, etc. Tables should not be submitted as photographs but should be typed double spaced on sheets separate from the text. The table and footnotes should be self-explanatory. Define errors in the table by a footnote; e.g., "mean, +/- SD" or"mean +/- SEM".

High Impact Manuscripts

To be considered as a High Impact Manuscript, a paper must be judged by the editors to be of special interest or importance or to apply innovative techniques or approaches. Authors may suggest that their papers be placed in this category, but the final decision will be the Editors'. High Impact Manuscripts will receive expedited review, revision, and publication. It will be possible for such papers to appear in print within four months of acceptance and sometimes within three months.

Color Art

The cost to authors for color art is $450 for each page or part of a page. Please enclose a letter agreeing to pay the color charge upon submission of the manuscript; such agreement must be received by the Journal before the article can be published. The art work of published articles will not be returned except for original art work as indicated above (see "Figures and Legends").

Communications

Authors may submit concise reports of work of unusual interest or importance with limited but definitive data for publication as a Communication. To be considered as a Communication , the manuscript should not exceed four printed pages including all written material, figures, tables, and references, and should have not more than about 30 references; about 1200 words of Results text without figures require one page. Manuscripts will receive expedited review and should be publishable without significant revision. Communications will be published in the second or third month after acceptance. Because only minimal revision will be possible, manuscripts submitted as Communicationsmust conform to guidelines in Information for Authors.

Review Articles

The Journal welcomes minireviews of three to four journal pages describing recent developments of interest to readers. Such reviews should not be extensive in nature or contain exhaustive references and should be accessible to readers not intimately familiar with the subject under review. They should serve to increase readers' interest and to point out important and exciting recent developments rather than to serve as an encyclopedic reference. Longer reviews will also be considered.

The Review Process

Manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two reviewers from the editorial board and the Journal reviewer database and also by one or more Associate or Deputy Editors and by the Editor. Manuscripts will not be returned by reviewers, but art work will be returned. Four copies of relevant papers in press, particularly if cited in the references, should be submitted with the manuscript; four copies of any closely related published paper may also be submitted with the manuscript to facilitate review. Manuscripts returned for revision should be resubmitted within six months and in most cases may be resubmitted only once. If a manuscript is not accepted, written appeals will be considered.