Microbiologia Medica
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Manuscripts submitted to Microbiologia Medica must represent reports of original research. All results previously presented at a scientific meeting or in another public context must be declared, giving the context, location and date of presentation. Studies addressed to diagnostic tests must follow the recommendations reported in Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy (STARD): http://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/stard/. After publication the copyright of the article transfers to AMCLI.
As an option, PAGEPress offers its own professional copyediting service. Professional copyediting can help authors improve the presentation of their work and increase its chances of being taken on by a publisher. In case you feel that your manuscript needs a professional English language copyediting checking language grammar and style, you can find a reliable revision service at:
Manuscripts should be structured as follows: Title page, Summary, Introduction, Materials and Methods (or Patients and Methods), Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, References, Figures and Tables. Times New Roman 12 is the advised font; lines should be numbered and 1,5 spaced; pages should be numbered consecutively (including first page).
Manuscripts must be submitted in English (UK spelling). Authors whose native language is not English are strongly advised to have their manuscript checked by a language editing service, or by an English mother-tongue colleague prior to submission.
Do not duplicate data and information by presenting them both in the text and in figures/tables.
Genus and species names should be written in italic and in full when first cited. The names should be then abbreviated, provided that no ambiguity will arise. Only generic names of drugs should be used, although trade names may follow in parentheses (only if necessary for comprehension). Brand and company names and locations for equipment, compounds and substances should be included in parentheses within the text.
Authors are kindly required to suggest at least two potential reviewers (name, affiliation and e-mail) for their manuscript in the "Comments to the Editor" field (Step 1. Submission Process).
First page: the title page must contain: a) a concise but informative title; b) names and surnames of all authors; c) their affiliating institutions indicated by Arabic numbers; d) name and surname, address, tel/fax numbers and e-mail address of the author to whom correspondence should be addressed; e) a short running title; and f) no more than 6 key words.
Second page: it should contain a) authors' contributions, i.e., information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in the study (http://www.icmje.org/#author); b) disclosures about potential conflict of interest.
Summary: it should not exceed 250 words. It must be structured in: background and aims, materials and methods, results and conclusions.
Introduction: the introduction should briefly explain the background of the study and the purpose of the paper. Materials and methods: this section should describe materials or subjects, as well as methods, used in the paper, sufficiently in detail to allow other researchers to reproduce the study. Each innovative technique must be detailed, while for usual methods a bibliographic citation is required. Any procedure used for quality control must be specified. Results: results presented in tabular or illustrative form should not be reiterated in the text; only the most salient findings should be emphasized. Any interpretation of data included in the Discussion must be avoided. Discussion: the relevance of the study's results in comparison with other data from previous literature should be underlined. It should be stated whether the aim of the study has been achieved or not. Information presented in the Introduction should not be repeated. Acknowledgements: any grant or funding must be acknowledged; any technical assistance and contributions not justifying authorship must be included as well. References: they must be listed in alphabetic order. The author is responsible for the accuracy and completeness of all references, which should be listed in alphabetic order and numbered, with the numbers cited in the text in brackets before punctuation marks, according to the Vancouver style (examples following).
Goate AM, Haynes AR, Owen MJ, et al. Predisposing locus for Alzheimier's disease on chromosome 21. Lancet 1989; 1: 352-5.
Roberts GD, Koneman EW, Him YK. Mycobacterium. In: Manual of Clinical Microbiology, Balows A, Isenberg HD Eds, Fifth Edition. American Society for Microbiology, Washington DC 1991; 304-39.
Chapter from a Book
Hedburgh H, Nord CE. Anaerobic bacteria. In: Yu VL, Weber R, Raoult D, eds. Antimicrobial therapy and vaccines. 2nd edn. New York: Apple Tree Productions, 2002: 55-63.
Tables: Tables should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numbers, in the order they are first presented in the text. Each Table (not tab.) should be presented in the text. Each table must be given a title, which should be descriptive enough to stand alone. Any abbreviations and symbols should be defined in the Table footnotes. Written permission to reproduce data from another source (published or not) must be obtained before publication. Figures: Figures may include graphs, good laser prints or photographs. Figures should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numbers, in the order they are first presented in the text. Each Figure (not fig.) should be presented in the text. A different caption for each figure must be provided at the end of the manuscript, on a separate sheet, and not included in the figure. Written permission to reproduce data from another source (published or not) must be obtained before publication.
Editorials: they should addressed any topic arisen from recent publications, as a matter of discussion. They are generally invited papers. They must not exceed 3000 words, including references. Summary is not required.
Reviews: Reviews are expected to be focused on topics relevant for clinical microbiology. he manuscript should not exceed 5000 words, including references.
Original articles: Original articles report original observations, new techniques or methods. The manuscript (in total 2500 words) should be structured as follows: summary, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, up to 30 references.
Clinical reports: clinical cases should not exceed 1500 words; they refer to clinical situations with particular interest for clinical microbiology. The text should include a summary, a brief introduction, the case description (clinical symptoms, laboratory tests and any useful observation) the results of the study, up to 10 references.
Short communications: they are short papers (no more than 1000 words). The text should include: brief summary (max. 500 words), introduction, type of the study, conclusions, up to 15 references.
Letters to the Editor: they must refer to a paper recently published in MM. The letter will be sent to the original authors to solicit a reply. The original letter and the possible reply will be published simultaneously. The letter must include max 500 words (with a Figure or a Table if required) and up to 5 references.
All manuscripts submitted to our journal are critically assessed by external and/or in-house experts in accordance with the principles of peer review (http://www.icmje.org/#peer), which is fundamental to the scientific publication process and the dissemination of sound science. Each paper is first assigned by the Editors to an appropriate Associate Editor who has knowledge of the field discussed in the manuscript. The first step of manuscript selection takes place entirely in-house and has two major objectives: i) to establish the article appropriateness for our journals readership; ii) to define the manuscript priority ranking relative to other manuscripts under consideration, since the number of papers that the journal receives is much greater than it can publish. If a manuscript does not receive a sufficiently high priority score to warrant publication, the editors will proceed to a quick rejection. The remaining articles are reviewed by at least two different external referees (second step or classical peer review). Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Uniform Requirements established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) (http://www.icmje.org/#prepare).
All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria (http://www.icmje.org/ethical_1author.html). Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should only be based on substantial contributions to i) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; and to ii) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on iii) final approval of the version to be published. These three conditions must all be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author. Authors should provide a brief description of their individual contributions.
Obligation to Register Clinical Trials (http://www.icmje.org/#clin_trials)
The ICMJE believes that it is important to foster a comprehensive, publicly available database of clinical trials. The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or concurrent comparison or control groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Medical interventions include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, etc. Our journals require, as a condition of consideration for publication, registration in a public trials registry. The journal considers a trial for publication only if it has been registered before the enrollment of the first patient. The journal does not advocate one particular registry, but requires authors to register their trial in a registry that meets several criteria. The registry must be accessible to the public at no charge. It must be open to all prospective registrants and managed by a non-profit organization. There must be a mechanism to ensure the validity of the registration data, and the registry should be electronically searchable. An acceptable registry must include a minimum of data elements (http://www.icmje.org/#clin_trials). For example, ClinicalTrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov), sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine, meets these requirements.
Protection of Human Subjects and Animals in Research
When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013 (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the World Medical Association (2016 revision, https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-statement-on-animal-use-in-biomedical-research) and from the International Association of Veterinary Editors' Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare (http://www.veteditors.org/consensus-author-guidelines-on-animal-ethics-and-welfare-for-editors). When reporting experiments on ecosystems involving non-native species, Authors are bound to ensure compliance with the institutional and national guide for the preservation of native biodiversity.
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a complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.
Microbiologia Medica [ISSN 2280-6423]
is the official journal of the Italian Association of Clinical Microbiologists (AMCLI) and it is published by PAGEPress®, Pavia, Italy.