Information for Authors

All material to be considered for publication in Family Practice should be submitted in electronic form via the journal's online submission system. Once you have prepared your manuscript according to the instructions below please visit the online submission web site. Instructions on submitting your manuscript online are available via this site or can be viewed here. In case of query please contact Family Practice.

Family Practice is an international journal for those active in research, teaching and practice in the fields of Primary Care, Family Medicine and General Practice. We welcome contributions from disciplines outside medicine, including nursing and social science. Priority will be given to high-quality original research that advances knowledge in clinical care, organisation or methodology and is generalisable to other settings and countries. We would particularly like to encourage the reporting of randomised controlled trials from Primary Care.

Peer review policy
All papers published in Family Practice are subject to peer review. Some papers that are outside the remit of the journal, that do not comply with the guidelines below or are otherwise judged to be unsuitable by the editor will be rejected without peer review. All other papers will be sent to two peer reviewers, authors are welcome to suggest reviewers, and we may choose one of them. Reviewers advise on the originality and scientific merit of the paper, the editor, with advice from the editorial board, decides on publication.

Author requirements
All submissions should be accompanied by a short letter indicating that the corresponding author takes full responsibility for the contents of the paper.

Declarations:

ALL SUBMITTED PAPERS SHOULD INDICATE AT THE END OF THE TEXT
1. Any necessary ethical approval(s).
2. The source of funding for the study.
3. Any conflict of interest. This includes ownership of shares, consultancy, speaker's honoraria or research grants from commercial companies or professional or governmental organisations with an interest in the topic of the paper. If in doubt, disclose.

At the point of submission, Family Practice’s policy requires that each author reveal any financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or other situations that might raise the question of bias in the work reported or the conclusions, implications, or opinions stated - including pertinent commercial or other sources of funding for the individual author(s) or for the associated department(s) or organization(s), personal relationships, or direct academic competition. When considering whether you should declare a conflicting interest or connection please consider the conflict of interest test: Is there any arrangement that would embarrass you or any of your co-authors if it was to emerge after publication and you had not declared it?

As an integral part of the online submission process, Corresponding authors are required to confirm whether they or their co-authors have any conflicts of interest to declare, and to provide details of these. If the Corresponding author is unable to confirm this information on behalf of all co-authors, the authors in question will then be required to submit a completed Conflict of Interest form to the Editorial Office. It is the Corresponding author’s responsibility to ensure that all authors adhere to this policy.

If the manuscript is published, Conflict of Interest information will be communicated in a statement in the published paper.

Guidelines on specific papers:

1. Randomised trials must conform to the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) statement (http://www.consort-statement.org) on the reporting of RCTs. In particular a flowdiagram of subjects must be included in the paper and a numbered checklist must be provided as supplementary material.

2. Systematic reviews must conform to the QUOROM statement (Moher D, Cook DJ, Eastwood S, Olkin I, Rennie D, Stroup DF, for the QUOROM Group. Improving the quality of reports of meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials: the QUOROM statement. Lancet 1999; 354: 1896-1900. http://www.thelancet.com/era/LLAN.ERA.1051)

3. Reports of diagnostic studies must conform to the STARD statement (http://www.consort-statement.org/stardstatement.htm)

4. Reports of economic evaluations must conform to the priciples set out by Drummond and Jefferson. BMJ 1996;313:275-285.

5. For qualitative research, sufficient quotes to support the conclusions, numbered to indicate the respondent, should be included.

Submission of the Manuscript
All material to be considered for publication in Family Practice should be submitted in electronic form via the journal's online submission system. Once you have prepared your manuscript according to the instructions below, please visit http://fampra.oupjournals.org to access the online submission site and for instructions on submitting online.
Submission of a manuscript implies that it reports unpublished work and that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Preparation of the Manuscript
Please note: This journal does not accept Microsoft Word 2007 documents at this time. Please use Word's "Save As" option to save your document as an older (.doc) file type.
Manuscripts should be prepared using an appropriate word-processing package, double-spaced and with ample margins. In addition to the full title of the paper, authors should supply a 'running title'' which will appear at the heads of pages. Authors should note that papers may be subject to editing.

Articles should be 2500/3000 words in extent, with tables usually not exceeding five and references normally not exceeding twenty. Authors should supply a structured abstract to include: background, objective(s), methods (include design, setting, subject and main outcome measures as appropriate), results and conclusion. The abstract should be followed by up to five keywords recognized by Index Medicus. Family Practice accepts E-letters which may be submitted to the journal via the online version of each article. Please see the weblink on the journal homepage for more information.

Systematic Review articles only,will also be accepted, approximately 5000 words in extent with no limit on the number of references. Review articles should also contain a structured abstract giving information on methods of selecting the publications cited. Short reports of up to 700 words should have no more than one table and five references. Writing should be clear and simple, avoiding excessive use of the passive, and written in good clear 'international' English.

When preparing your manuscript electronically, please follow these guidelines:

• When creating and/or editing your manuscript, use the document mode (or equivalent) in the word-processor program.
• Type the title, authors and affiliations in the journal style, i.e. in upper and lower case, with bold font for the title and authors.
• The text should be typed unjustified, without hyphenation (except for compounded words) and at double line spacing.
• Headings should be typed as follows: main (section) headings in bold upper and lower case; sub-headings in italic upper and lower case letters with the text beginning on the next line; sub-sub-headings in italic (or underlined) upper and lower case letters with the text continued on the same line.
• Indexing flags should not be included in the text.
• Enter only one space at the end of a sentence and after commas, semi-colons and colons. No space should be inserted before these punctuation marks.
• Do not use lower case l (ell) for 1(one) or O for 0 (zero). These may look interchangeable but they are not since they have different electronic values.
• To help identify any characters hand-written into a manuscript submitted on disk, please use a coloured pen, highlighter or other easily identified indicator on one submitted copy of the manuscript.
• Do not include any copyright material (e.g. word processor soft-ware or operating system files) on the disk because this can create difficulties with Custom clearance.
• Check the final copy of your paper carefully because spelling mistakes, inconsistencies and errors will be faithfully translated into the typeset copy.

References
References should be in the 1997 Vancouver style (Ann. Intern. Med. 1997; 126: 38-48 and http://www.wame.org), in the order made in the text and numbered accordingly. These numbers should be inserted above the line on each occasion a reference is cited (confirmed by other studies. 23). Numbered references should appear at the end of the article and should consist of the surnames and initials of all authors when six or less, when seven or more list first three and add et al., title of article, name of journal abbreviated according to Index Medicus style, year, volume, first and last page numbers, e.g. 10 Simpson H C R, Barker K, Carter R D, Cassels E, Mann J I. Low dietary intake of linoleic acid predisposes to myocardial infarction. Br Med J 1982; 285: 683-684.
For books, names and initials of all authors, the full title, place of publication, publisher, year of publication and page number should be given.
All measures should be reported in Sl units fo

Illustrations and tables
Illustrations and tables should be kept separate from the text; all figure captions should be typed with double spacing between the lines on a separate sheet at the end of the text, 'Captions to Figures'. Tables should be numbered and have a title and be as simple as possible.
Illustrations and tables must be cited in order in the text and the desired position in the text clearly marked. Illustrations should be identified with the author's name and the figure number and the top edge indicated. Original drawings may be submitted although high quality glossy prints are preferable.

Funding
Details of all funding sources for the work in question should be given in a separate section entitled 'Funding'. This should appear before the 'Acknowledgements' section.

The following rules should be followed:

• The sentence should begin: ‘This work was supported by …’
• The full official funding agency name should be given, i.e. ‘National Institutes of Health’, not ‘NIH’ (full RIN-approved list of UK funding agencies) Grant numbers should be given in brackets as follows: ‘[grant number xxxx]’
• Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma as follows: ‘[grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]’
• Agencies should be separated by a semi-colon (plus ‘and’ before the last funding agency)
• Where individuals need to be specified for certain sources of funding the following text should be added after the relevant agency or grant number 'to [author initials]'.

An example is given here: ‘This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [AA123456 to C.S., BB765432 to M.H.]; and the Alcohol & Education Research Council [hfygr667789].’

Supplementary data
Supporting material that is not essential for inclusion in the full text of the manuscript, but would nevertheless benefit the reader, can be made available by the publisher as online-only content, linked to the online manuscript. The material should not be essential to understanding the conclusions of the paper, but should contain data that is additional or complementary and directly relevant to the article content. Such information might included more detailed Methods, extended data sets/data analysis, or additional figures (including colour). All text and figures must be provided in suitable electronic formats (for instructions for the preparation of Supplementary Data please go to http://www3.oup.co.uk/ jnls/ list/famprj/ for_authors/auth1.html).

All material to be considered as Supplementary Data must be submitted AS SEPARATE FILES BUT at the same time as the main manuscript for peer review. It cannot be altered or replaced after the paper has been accepted for publication. Please indicate clearly the material intended as Supplementary Data upon submission. Also ensure that the Supplementary Data is referred to in the main manuscript.

Copyright
It is a condition of publication in the Journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to Oxford University Press. This ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently and will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. As part of the licence agreement, authors may use their own material in other publications provided that the Journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication, and Oxford University Press is notified in writing and in advance. For licence to publish form click here.
Information about the New Creative Commons licence can be found here.

For information on how to request permissions to reproduce articles/ information from this journal, please visit www.oxfordjournals.org/permissions.

Author Self-Archiving/Public Access policy from July 2005

For information about this journal's policy, please visit our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

Advertising
Inquiries about advertising should be send to Peter Carpenter. PRC Associates. Email: mail@prcassoc.co.uk. Fax: +44 (0)20 8786 7262.

Offprints
The author will receive the URL of his article free of charge to distribute instead of offprints with an option to buy offprints at reasonable prices

Supplements, Reprints, and Corporate Sales
Requests from industry and companies regarding supplements, bulk article reprints, sponsored subscriptions, translation opportunities for previously published material, and corporate online opportunities. Contact: "Special.Sales@oxfordjournals.org", fax: +44 (0) 1865 353774, or visit www.oxfordjournals.org/permissions

Back issues
The current plus two back volumes are available from Oxford University Press. Previous volumes can be obtained from the Periodicals Service Company, 11 Main Street, Germantown, NY 12526, USA. Tel: +1 (518) 537 4700; Fax: +1 (518) 537 5899.

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