Abstract supplements - Guidelines for Organizers
Collection of Abstracts
All abstracts should be reviewed by meeting organizers prior to submission to ensure suitability for publication. Submitted abstracts must be in their final edited format. Organizers must ensure that authors are aware that abstracts will be submitted for publication in a BioMed Central journal.
While we can accept corrections to the abstracts after submission, any major editorial changes that are required may result in extra charges.
Organizers will be asked to check the content of each abstract after the initial coding stage. Corrections should be supplied to BioMed Central as a batch. Please see "The production process" below for full details.
File for submission
Abstracts should be submitted as a single file (.DOC or .RTF). Abstracts should appear in the file in the order they are to be published, and should be numbered consecutively, using any combination of the following formats:
| I1 |
for an introductory article, if applicable |
| A1, A2, A3 |
default numbering – use this if you don’t wish to specify the type of presentation |
| P1, P2, P3 |
for poster presentations |
| S1, S2, S3 |
for speaker presentations or |
| O1, O2, O3 |
for oral presentations |
If you wish to use any other prefix letters, please let us know.
NB In the online publication, abstracts will appear in the alphabetical order of the prefix letters above.
Each abstract should ideally be separated from the next using a page break. Please detail any session numbers or titles that you wish to include on a separate page before the abstracts start.
All abstracts should be in English. Spelling within any one abstract should be US English or UK English, but not a mixture.
Figures should be included in the main text file where they are to appear. If, for any reason, figures are supplied as separate files, please ensure that the figure filename matches the abstract number so that we can easily identify where it is to be positioned.
Guidelines – variables
Our general guidelines for preparation are attached and these are intended to be suitable for circulation with your call for abstracts. There are items that you may wish to alter, however. A list of these possible variables is given below. If you have already collected your abstracts and the formatting differs from our guidelines, please send us a representative selection of examples so we can let you know what needs to be changed so that the abstracts will conform in the most important ways.
Email addresses We can include an email address for the corresponding author on the published abstract. If you want this to be included in your abstracts, please ensure that it is included in the relevant abstract, after the affiliations and before the text in the format: E-mail: me@bmc.com, and underline the corresponding author's name.
Please note, however, that you are responsible for ensuring that authors agree to the inclusion of email addresses under data protection laws that may apply in your country.
Please supply BioMed Central with a separate list of contact e-mail addresses for authors. As part of the agreement to publish we ask for this information in case of any necessary communication with the author. We may also contact the author following publication to encourage the submission of original manuscripts to the journal.
Tables Some organizers may not want to accept tables in abstracts. If this is the case, then simply remove this section from the guidelines. Please request that tables are kept to a minimum.
Figures Our standard guidelines request that figures are prepared as 300 dpi; if you plan to print the abstracts, you may wish to change this to 600 dpi. Some organizers may not want to accept figures in abstracts. If this is the case, then simply remove this section from the guidelines. Please request that figures are kept to a minimum.
References We automatically link references to PubMed where possible, so it is important that references are supplied in the correct format. Some organizers prefer not to accept references in abstracts. Again, if this is the case, please remove the section from the guidelines.
Please supply BioMed Central with a copy of the guidelines you are distributing.
List of information required by BioMed Central at submission
Before we can begin production we will need the following information, which should be provided on or before article submission:
- A list of Editors
A list of the Editors (with short affiliations if required) of the supplement should be provided, if applicable. Editors’ names will appear on the supplement browse page (i.e. the first page of the online contents list – see http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9?issue=S7 for an example).
- Confirmation of meeting details
Please confirm the exact title, location and dates of the meeting (if applicable), which will be displayed on the supplement browse page.
- Title of supplement
Please provide a suitable title for the supplement. If you have published proceedings from this conference with BioMed Central before, we suggest that the name follows a similar pattern for continuity. Note that we prefer not to have any undefined abbreviations or acronyms in the title and that we suggest that the title starts with "Proceedings of" if appropriate.
- Article types
All articles published in BioMed Central journals are given an 'article type', eg Oral presentation, Poster presentation. Unless otherwise requested by the organizer, supplement abstracts will be defined as "Meeting abstracts".
Meeting organizers may also provide:
- Further information about the supplement
This allows organizers to include additional information about the supplement, such as acknowledgements, a list of the organizing committee members, contact addresses, etc.
Further information should be submitted both as a Word file and as a PDF. The PDF will be available via a link on the supplement browse page called "Additional information", but will not be produced in full-text format or submitted to PubMed.
BioMed Central reserves the right to approve the content and to add or amend information subject to agreement with the organizers.
- Further information about the conference
We can include a link to a specific website for the meeting – please supply the URL. Please note that this should be a permanent web address, rather than one that is likely to change. This link will appear via a link on the supplement browse page called "Conference website".
- Sponsorship
A brief sponsorship acknowledgement may be included. BioMed Central reserves the right to approve or amend the wording subject to agreement with the organizers.
The production process
- Submission
Please contact us via supplements@biomedcentral.com when you are ready to submit the abstracts. Submission can be by email, via our dedicated ftp site (please ask for details), or on CD-ROM.
- BioMed Central submission check
BioMed Central checks the formatting of the submitted abstracts and notes any incorrect formatting or missing information. BioMed Central sends the organizer a list of any requested changes.
- Organizer and author full-text check
BioMed Central codes the correctly formatted files into XML and provides the organizer with a list of URLs where the full-text versions of the abstracts can be found.
Since all editorial work should have been completed prior to submission, this checking stage is only to ensure that the full-text version of the abstracts matches the file submitted to BioMed Central and that all content displays correctly on screen. Editorial corrections should not be made at this stage, unless absolutely essential.
Corrections should be collected by the organizer and provided to BioMed Central.
- Full-text corrections stage
BioMed Central will make any necessary corrections to the full-text versions of the abstracts and notify the organizer when this has been done. The organizer may be asked to check that any complicated corrections have been completed properly.
- Final corrections and PDF production
BioMed Central will enter any final corrections and check in-house that these have been carried out correctly. If there are complex corrections that are still unclear, BioMed Central will contact the organizer for final approval.
BioMed Central will create a typeset PDF containing all the abstracts and check it in-house, and will notify the organizer of the proposed publication date.
- Publication
All abstracts are published simultaneously in both full-text and PDF versions and BioMed Central will email the organizer when this has been done.
- Post-publication
BioMed Central will submit all abstracts supplement to the NCBI who will evaluate it for inclusion as a listing in PubMed (note that PubMed does not list individual abstracts). Publication of the supplement will be announced on the journal’s homepage, the BioMed Central homepage and in the BioMed Central Email Update to registered users.
In the event of any queries, authors should contact the organizer in the first instance and queries that cannot be resolved should be forwarded to the supplements team at supplements@biomedcentral.com. Additionally, BioMed Central is always interested in receiving feedback regarding our supplement publishing service.
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