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Review

Criteria

Reviews are summaries of recent insights in specific research areas within the scope of Veterinary Research.

Key aims of Reviews are to provide systematic and substantial coverage of mature subjects and evaluations of progress in specified areas.

Veterinary Research 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 information on recommended repositories.

Cover Letter

Please provide a list of up to 3 potential reviewers in your cover letter. Please note that you must not suggest recent collaborators or colleagues who work in the same institution as yourselves. Additionally, please do not give exclusively the names of people from your own country. 

You should provide institutional email addresses where possible, or information which will help the Editor to verify the identity of the reviewer (for example an ORCID or Scopus ID). See our Editorial policies for guidance on suggesting peer reviewers.

Preparing your manuscript

Length of article

Reviews should not exceed 50 pages. The journal allows a maximum of 200 references for Review articles.

Title page

The title page should:

  • provide the title of the article
  • list the full names, institutional addresses and email addresses for all authors
  • indicate the corresponding author

Please note:

  • 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. Please note that the individual names may not be included 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.
  • abbreviations within the title should be avoided

Table of contents

This will list all the sections and subsections in order of appearance, starting with individual headings.

Abstract

A short, unstructured, single paragraph summary, no more than 350 words, of the major points raised, making evident the key work highlighted in the article.

Keywords

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

Introduction

This section should put the work in adequate context and should be comprehensible to non-experts some of who may not have a scientific or technological background.

Review

This should contain the body of the article, and may also be broken into subsections with short, informative headings.

Conclusions

This should state clearly the main conclusions of the review and give a clear explanation of their importance and relevance.

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://dx.doi.org/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

See our editorial policies for author guidance on good citation practice.

All references, including URLs, must be numbered consecutively, in square brackets, in the order in which they are cited in the text, followed by any in tables or legends. Each reference must have an individual reference number. Please avoid excessive referencing. The journal allows a maximum of 200 references for Review articles. If automatic numbering systems are used, the reference numbers must be finalized and the bibliography must be fully formatted before submission.

Examples of the Veterinary Research reference style

Article within a journal
Mihovilovic MD, Leisch HG, Mereiter K (2004) Microwave-mediated intramolecular Diels-Alder cyclization of biodihydroxylated benzoic acid derivatives. Tetrahedron Lett 45:7087-7090

Article within a journal supplement
Fubini B (1997) Surface reactivity in the pathogenic response to particulates. Environ Health Perspect 105(Suppl 5):1013–1020

In press article
Van Damme S, Langenaeker W, Bultinck P (2012) Prediction of Blood-brain partitioning: a model based on ab initio calculated quantum chemical descriptors. Journal of Molecular graphics and modeling, in press

Published abstract
Herres-Pawlis S, Haase R, Bienemann O (2011) Dissecting the role of guanidine copper complexes in atom transfer radical polymerization by density functional theory [abstract] J Cheminf 3(Suppl1):P28

Article within conference proceedings
Schurath U, Wipprecht V (1980) Reactions of peroxiacyl radicals. In: Versino B, Ott H (eds) Proceedings of the 1st European Symposium on the Physico-Chemical Behavior of Atmospheric Pollutants, Ispra, October 1979. Commission of the European Communities, pp 157-166.

Book chapter, or article within a book
Ellis GP (1977) The chemistry of heterocyclic compounds. In: Weissberger A, Taylor ECE (eds) Chromene, Chromanes and Chromone, Volume 2. Wiley, New York

Whole issue of journal
Weckhuysen B (Ed) (2010) In-situ characterisation of heterogeneous catalysts. Chem Soc Rev 39:4541-5072

Whole conference proceedings
Brown S, Clarke I, Williams P (eds) (2001) Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Ceramics in Medicine, Palm Springs, California, USA.

Complete book
Görög S (1994) Ultraviolet-Visible Spectrophotometry in Pharmaceutical Analysis. CRC Press, New York

Monograph or book in a series
Fujiki M (2008) Helix Generation, Amplification, Switching, and Memory of Chromophoric Polymers. In: Soai K (ed) Amplification of Chirality. Topics in Current Chemistry, vol 284. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 119-186

Book with institutional author
IUPAC (1979) Nomenclature of Organic Chemistry. Pergamon Press, Oxford

PhD thesis
Ravi Kishore VVN (2004) Photo-luminescence and electron-luminescence of hydroxy quinoline based organic semiconductors. PhD Thesis, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Department of Chemical Sciences

Link / URL
The Chemistry Development Kit. http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdk. Accessed 25 Dec 2012

Link / URL with author(s)
Pichon A (2010) Debating cyclobutadiene. http:// blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/2010/11/debating_cyclobutadiene.html. Accessed 22 Feb 2011

Dataset with persistent identifier
Bradley JC, Neylon C, Guha R, Williams AJ, Hooker B, Lang ASID, Friesen B, Bohinski T, Bulger D, Federici M, Hale J, Mancinelli J, Mirza KB, Moritz MJ, Rein D, Tchakounte C, Truong HT (2010) Open Notebook Science Challenge: Solubilities of Organic Compounds in Organic Solvents. Nature Precedings. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2010.4243.3

What should be cited?

Only articles, clinical trial registration records and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers, may be cited.

Unpublished abstracts, unpublished data and personal communications should not be included in the reference list, but may be included in the text and referred to as "unpublished observations" or "personal communications" giving the names of the involved researchers. Obtaining permission to quote personal communications and unpublished data from the cited colleagues is the responsibility of the author. Only footnotes are permitted. Journal abbreviations follow Index Medicus/MEDLINE.

Any in press articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers' assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the editorial office.

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.

Figures, tables and additional files

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

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