The Swiss Medical Weekly accepts for consideration previously unpublished original articles from all fields of medicine. In addition to clinical topics, manuscripts dealing with basic medical science are welcome if they are of (1) general and (2) clinical interest.

Prior to publication, all manuscripts, with the exception of Editorials and Letters to the Editors, undergo peer review. The Editorial Board may decline a paper on the basis of internal review and rapidly return the manuscript, usually within three weeks.

The guidelines for authors are based on the guidelines published by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (Uniform Requirements).

All accepted original articles will be published immediately in full text in the Internet, with open access and no word limit. Authors will be asked to produce the extended abstract, using a template from us, after the full article has been accepted.

Authorship / financial support

Authorship credit should be based only on (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship, nor does the fact of being in sole charge of the clinic or department in which the article was prepared. Such contributions should be listed as acknowledgements. In view of these requirements, more than six authors will be listed only in exceptional cases.

All authors must sign the "Author's form". Authors will be asked to submit the author's forms during the online submission process. By their signature the authors will also have to certify that neither this manuscript, nor any other with substantially similar content by one or more of the same authors, has been published, accepted or is currently being assessed by another journal with a view to publication.

Outside financial support or other financial or personal relationships in connection with the submitted manuscript should be indicated in the author's form and in a footnote on the title page of the manuscript.

Plagiarism detection

EMH Swiss Medical Publishers Ltd. is a member of CrossCheck, a service offered by CrossRef and powered by iThenticate software. iThenticate is a plagiarism screening service that verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. iThenticate checks submissions against millions of published research papers, and billions of web content. Authors, researchers and freelancers can also use iThenticate to screen their work before submission by visiting www.ithenticate.com.

Obligation to register clinical trials

We encourage the registration of clinical trials in a primary registry that participates in WHO's International Clinical Trial Registry Platform. The registry must be independent of for-profit interest.

Please include the trial registration number and the name of the trial registry at the end of the abstract.

The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or concurrent comparison or control groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Medical interventions include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, and the like.

Publication ehtics

Ethics approval of research

When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008. If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

We require every article reporting results of prospective research using human subjects or samples or results of animal research to include a statement that the study obtained ethical approval, including the name of the ethics committee(s) or institutional review board(s) and the number/ID of the approval(s).

Where ethical approval is not required, the manuscript should include a clear statement of this and the reason why.

Protection of patients’ rights to privacy

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients’ names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity.

Authors should disclose to these patients that the material will be available via the Internet after publication. An informed consent form may be obtained from the publisher.

Rapid publication

If authors feel that for reasons of general or public interest their manuscript requires more expeditious publication and quick processing through peer review, they may inform the Editorial Board during the online submission process indicating:
 
- the reasons the authors think the manuscript should be published immediately;
- the question(s) addressed by the study;
- the results obtained;
- the implications of the findings.
 
Upon receipt of such a request a member of the Editorial Board will contact the authors and negotiate the submission. SMW will review the manuscript within 4 weeks of submission and publish it within 6 weeks of acceptance of the final version.