Resources for Authors

USG accommodates a wide range of manuscript structures and considers manuscripts of any length with no restrictions for the number of words, figures, or the length of the supporting information.

All manuscripts should be typed in single column, double-spaced, and include line numbers and page numbers in order to facilitate the review process.

Generally for original research articles, manuscript file should include the following sections, in the below mentioned order: Title, Authors, Affiliations, Abstract, Introduction, Materials & Methods, Results & Discussion, Acknowledgements, References, Figure Legends, Table Legends and Supplementary files, if any. Figures and Tables must be submitted as separate files while submitting online through the editorial manager.

Authors may submit their manuscript files in Word (as .doc or .docx), LaTeX (as .pdf), or RTF format.

Units used in the manuscript must be in accordance with the International System of Units and standardized recommended nomenclature should be used as appropriate. Chemical compounds and bio-molecules should be referred to using systematic nomenclature, preferably using the recommendations by International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).

For the manuscripts dealing with the microbial strains and cultures, the public culture collections (ATCC, ECACC, NCTC, NCIMB, MTCC, etc) deposition number should be provided. The PubChem compound identifier (CID) number from the NCBI PubChem Compound database should be provided, if chemical compounds are used for the research. The list of the chemical compounds (with PubChem CID) and the microbial strains (deposition number) should be listed below the keywords section.

Standard abbreviations should be kept to a minimum and defined upon first use in the text whereas non-standard abbreviations should be avoided unless they appear at least four times in the text. Authors must include the list of non-standard abbreviations at the end, immediately before the acknowledgments section of their manuscript. Equations should be inserted in editable format from the equation editor (MathType is highly recommended).

Title

Manuscript file should contain the full article title and a short running title. The full title (maximum of 25 words) should be specific, concise and be a statement of the main finding or conclusion presented in the manuscript that can help the reader to decide whether they should read the text or not. Abbreviations should be avoided within the title. The running title should be a maximum of 6 words in length and should state the theme of the paper.

Authors and Affiliations

All author’s full names should be listed together with their respective affiliations which include the associated lab and / or department, university, or organization, city (pin or zip or post codes), state, country along with the phone numbers and email ids.

Abstract

The abstract should:

• Render the concept and significance of the work
• Describe the main / primary objective of the study
• Briefly outline how the study was done
• Notify the important results / findings
• Should not exceed 250 words in length.

Graphical Abstract (Optional)

Authors should summarize the contents of the article in a pictorial form that clearly represent the work described in the article. Graphical abstracts (Illustration / Figure) should be submitted as a separate file in the online submission system.

Keywords

Five to ten keywords representing the main content of the article should be given.

Introduction

The introduction should illustrate the research objective addressing the problem and help the readers to understand the purpose and significance of the study. This section should include a brief review of the literature search to justify the importance of the study. Also, the section should end with a brief statement of what is being reported in the article.

Material and Methods

The methods section should include the design of the study, methods and protocols, materials used (type of participants, if any), analytical procedures used and other information to allow other interested researchers to be able to reproduce your study.

For studies involving human or animal subjects, a statement detailing IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) /IRB (Institutional Review Board) and / or related ethical approval and consent should be included in the methods section. For further details of the journal's editorial policies and ethical guidelines please refer to USG Editorial Policies.

Results and Discussion

The results and discussion may be combined into a single section or presented separately. Results section should include the interpretations and / or extrapolations of the readings / results of the analytical procedures with statistical approach, where appropriate. Discussion should help understand the problem and how the outcome of this study advances the current system.

Together, this section should describe the results of the experiments and interpretation with the previous related studies discussing the hypothesis presented as the basis of the study and provides a succinct explanation of the implications of the findings.

Citation

Cite references in the text by name and year in parentheses. For e.g.,
Subject area covers many disciplines (Victor, 1981).
This assumption of theory was approved by John and Daniel (1996).
This technique was effectively proved and has been widely reported (Peter, 1991; Goodmann et al., 1995; Black and Smith, 2008; Mandal et al., 2012).

Conclusion

This section should clearly summarize the main conclusions of the research giving clear explanation of their importance and emphasizing on potential future directions.

List of Abbreviations

Authors should provide a list of abbreviations used in the text, and they should be defined in the text at first use.

Conflict of Interest Statement

USG follows the recommendations by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors stating that all financial, commercial or other relationships that might be perceived by the academic community as representing a potential conflict of interest must be disclosed. If no such relationship exists, authors will be asked to declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any interests mentioned. For more details, see USG Editorial policies.

Acknowledgments

This is a section to acknowledge persons (specific colleagues, institutions, or agencies) who have made substantial contributions to the design, implementation, acquisition of the data, analysis and interpretation of results and / or who was involved in drafting or revising the manuscript, but who do not fulfill the criteria to be included as an author. A statement about the source (s) of funding including grant numbers should be included, if appropriate.

References

All citations in the text, figures or tables must be in the reference list and vice-versa. References must be listed at the end of the manuscript and numbered in the order that they appear in the text. In the text, citations should be indicated by the reference number in square brackets. Journal abbreviations follow Index Medicus/MEDLINE. Only published or accepted manuscripts should be included in the reference list. For accepted but unpublished works, use “in press” instead of page numbers. Any inclusion of verbatim text must be contained in quotation marks and the source be clearly cited.

Examples of the USG reference style

Journal article
Blum K, Oscar-Berman M, Badgaiyan R, Braverman ER, Gold MS. Hypothesizing darkness induced alcohol intake linked to dopaminergic regulation of brain function. Psychology 2014 March;5(4):282-288.

In press article
Blum K, Oscar-Berman M, Denetrovics Z, Barh D, Gold MS. Genetic addiction risk score (GARS): Molecular neurogenetic evidence for predisposition to Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS). Mol Neurobiol 2014 May (In Press).

Complete book
Blum K. Molecular neurobiology of addiction recovery: the 12 steps program and fellowship. New York Springer, 2013.

Article or book chapter within a book
Blum K. Neurogenetics and nutrigenomics of reward deficiency syndrome. In: Barth RJ, Blum K, Madigan M (eds) Omics—biomedical perspectives and applications. CRC (Taylor & Francis), Boca Raton; 2012. pp 535–576.

Link / URL
The Mouse Tumor Biology Database. [http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do]

Clinical trial registration record
Mendelow, AD. Surgical Trial in Lobar Intracerebral Haemorrhage. Current Controlled Trials, 2006.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/ISRCTN22153967 Report of International Science Meets / Initiatives
World Health Organization Global initiative for the elimination of avoidable blindness. An informal consultation. WHO/PBL/97. 61. Geneva: WHO, 1997.

Figure and Table Legends

Figures and Tables files (including legends) must be submitted as separate files, not embedded in manuscript text. Legends should be included in the manuscript file and should be placed at the end of the manuscript. Legends are required to have a short title of 18 words or less and should describe the message of the figure or table. Legends should be preceded by the appropriate label, for example 'Figure 1' or 'Table 1'. Figure panels are referred to by bold capital letters in brackets: (A), (B), (C), (D), etc.

Tables: Tables should be created in Word, Excel or LaTeX and have a concise title. They must be primarily cell-based and editable. Graphics or colored fonts are not acceptable, instead bold or italic can be used to emphasize. Tables should be self-explanatory and include units in the column/row headings.

Figures: Figures should be of high-resolution files submitted in TIFF (or JPEG) or EPS (or PDF). Photos (both B/W and color) should be at least 300 dpi and line drawings 600 dpi. For certain scenarios such as need to print high-quality graphics, authors may be requested to submit higher resolution graphics.

Color Image Mode
Images must be submitted in the color mode RGB.

Chemical Structures

Chemical structures should be prepared using ChemDraw or other drawing programs and should select settings as close as possible according to the following given below:
Drawing settings: chain angle – 120 degrees; bond spacing - 18% of width; bond length - 14.4 pt; bold width - 2.0 pt; line width - 0.6 pt; margin width - 1.6 pt; hash spacing - 2.5 pt.
Text settings: Atom labels and captions font – Arial or Helvetica; size - 10 pt.

Direct Links

The databases for which authors can provide direct links in the manuscript are: GenBank at the NCBI (GenBank), EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (EMBL), Protein Data Bank (PDB), Protein Information Resource (PIR), Swiss-Prot Protein Database (Swiss-Prot) and DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ).
The Accession Numbers of any nucleic acid sequences, protein sequences or atomic coordinates cited in the manuscript must be provided in square brackets and include the corresponding database name (for example, [GenBank: JN872327]).

Mark Image

Authors are recommended to submit a 'mark image' that can be used to represent their article online in the journal homepage, table of contents, etc. Mark images should be single, high resolution, eye-catching image and ideally a cropped / full portion of image taken from the figures or raw images submitted as supporting information of the article. If no image is submitted, a figure from the paper will be designed as the mark image. Please do not submit any figures or photos that have been previously copyrighted unless you have explicit written permission from the copyright holder to publish.

Synopsis

For original full-length research articles and review articles, a synopsis are required which reflect in the content to represent their article online in the journal homepage, table of contents, etc. The content should specify the significance and emphasize the highlights of the research findings relative to the prior published studies or reports.

The data which is not of primary importance or cannot be included in the article because of its large size (array data, excel files, large size raw images etc.) or the current format (such as movies, raw data traces, power point presentations, etc.) can be uploaded as supplementary material during the submission procedure. The Supplementary Material can be uploaded as Figures (.FIG) and 3D imaging data (NIfTI), Data Sheet (word, excel, csv, fasta, pdf or zip files), Presentation (power point, pdf or zip files), Audio (mp3, wav or wma) or Movie (avi, divx, flv, mov, mp4, mpeg, mpg or wmv).

Review articles
The articles with a critical, constructive analysis of the previously published literature through a proper analysis, comparison and differentiation in a specific field addressing a research concept with broad significance identifying the research gaps; would be considered as a review article. The manuscript structure remains the same as mentioned for original full length research articles except that there would be a “review” / “body” instead of “results and discussion” section. The materials and methods section should contains for example the information about: selection criteria of studies, source of data / databases, search strategies, number of studies screened and included, treatment methods, statistical methods, softwares used, etc. The main part of the review article should focus on the methodological approaches, models, studies or theories that agree with another versus studies that disagree, explaining the text structure with chronological order and / or geographical location covering one idea, aspect or topic per paragraph. Author should make sure to organize the different pieces of information into a line of argument justifying the objective of the review. The conclusions should answer the research questions mentioned in the introduction and gives a message that integrates the points discussed in the review which recommend new research areas.

Clinical studies reports
Reports of the clinical investigations and / or observations should begin with an organized abstract that explain the purpose, study design, methods including selection procedure, primary outcome of the study and conclusion with their clinical relevance. After that the manuscript should follow the standard format: introduction describing the study principle, design and objectives; materials & methods used and types of analysis, presentation of results with discussion on safety and adverse events explaining the risk/benefit assessment and conclusions.

In studies involving animals, a statement describing the care of animals and details of IACUC ethical approval should be included in the manuscript. In studies involving experimental investigations, a declarative sentence stating that informed consent was obtained from the participants and the study was reviewed by the respective federal or appropriate ethics committee / gene therapy advisory committee or IRB or that no IRB approval was required, must be included in the manuscript.

Case report
Case report should begin with well-defined expressive abstract followed by the sections: introduction, case report(s), discussion and references. Author should state the potential impact of the case report to the medical scientific community in the abstract.

Letters to Editors
Letters to editors are generally, articles written in reference to the article (s) previously published in the journal. The article should comment or make suggestions to the work published previously and help in enhancing knowledge and to find way towards future research needs.

The journal also publishes invited editorials, short communications, case studies, monographs, etc.

USG reserves the right to reject the manuscripts publication that do not meet the technical or ethical standards (COPE) according to the editorial policies and retract publications if any breach and / or misconduct of ethical standards, dispute of interests comes to light during post-publication peer review process.

It is the sole responsibility of the authors to make sure that their research article does not include any plagiarized content and/or breach the ethical guidelines and the publishers are not responsible for any such scientific misconduct. USG vows to strictly adhere to all the policies and guidelines related to scientific publishing (as mentioned in the Publishing Policies and Guidelines section) and if any misconduct is detected at any time during the publication process, USG has the right to retract an article or publish erratum under the advice of the Editor-in-Chief.