Title

Authors are responsible for writing a title that is accurate, clear and short – no more than 20 words. The title is important, in part, for ensuring that relevant reviewers are found and for enabling readers to find your published paper. It should say what the paper is about and include, within the word limit, the main methods. If there is an RCT, that should always be mentioned. Please try to avoid using terms like “the effectiveness of” or “researching into”.

The format of the title should be: Intervention + patient group: acronym + study method

If the report includes a randomised control trial, please include 'RCT' in the title after the colon.

For example: Anti-psychotic drug reduction for adults with learning disabilities: the ANDREA-LD pilot RCT

Characteristics and needs of long-stay patients in high and medium secure settings: a mixed methods study

For Programme Grants for Applied Research, use the format: 'Subject: the XXX research programme'. For example: Reducing relapse and suicide in bipolar disorder: the PARADES research programme including 3 RCTs

Your title should be submitted with your manuscript. It will be reviewed during the editorial process for consistency and clarity. The final decision rests with the editorial office. 

Keywords

Please provide a list of keywords for your paper. Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) authors are expected to use MeSH on Demand to generate appropriate keywords.

Author List

Your title page must include details of authors’ names and their institutional affiliation at the time they worked on the paper (including department, full address and country). If you would like to include a group or collaboration within your author list, please see the below information for details. Please also provide the corresponding author's contact details (including email, telephone number and address).

Please note that Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools do not meet our authorship criteria and therefore cannot be considered as authors. We follow the ICMJE recommendations on authorship matters. See the ICMJE guidance on defining the roles of authors and contributors for more information.

Author guidelines for presentation of long author lists

Lists that have many names

Text presentation

All authors should be listed on the title page, regardless of how many names there are. If there are too many names to fit on one page, the list will carry over to the following page. For the press cover, the names will continue to the first inside page.

Lists of members of groups named in the author list as authors

Groups that are listed as full authors in the author list, i.e. where the group name is included directly in the author list and does not follow ‘on behalf of’, will have their members listed as non-author collaborators on PubMed. See the National Library of Medicine - Authorship in MEDLINE webpage for more information.

Text presentation

• The group name should appear directly in the author list on the title page (i.e. not following ‘on behalf of’). 
• The names of individual group members should appear in Appendix 1.  
• If there is more than one group listed as an author, each group should be listed in its own appendix.
• The appendix should be titled with the name of the group, for example:
  • Appendix 1 Members of the Good Research Group
• In the appendix, the authors should be formatted as follows, one per line:
  • Jane Smith, Department of Investigations, Research University, Studyton.
  • https://orcid.org/0000-0012-3456-789X

Roles, affiliations and ORCID IDs can be included, but they will not be displayed on PubMed. If they are present, they should appear after the name, on the same line. If more than one author has the same affiliation, the affiliation should be repeated.

Lists of members of groups mentioned in the author list as ‘on behalf of’

If a group is listed at the end of the author list with the prefix ‘on behalf of’, this implies that the authors, who are working on behalf of the group, have published the paper, and the group as a whole is not a direct author of the publication. 

Group member names will not appear in PubMed. Naming the members of the group is therefore for acknowledgement only. 

Text presentation

• The group name should appear at the end of the author list on the title page, prefixed by the text ‘on behalf of’. 
• The names of the group members do not have to be shown, but if they are given, they should appear as part of the Additional Information section, under a sub-heading containing the name of the group; for example:
  • Members of the Good Research Group