Manuscript submission and preparation
Title page document
The title is the most important part of the manuscript. The first words should incorporate the most important aspects to be searchable. It should be short and carry the main message. The short and concise title should incorporate, if appropriate, the study design or, for non-clinical or non-research studies, a description of what the article reports.
Furthermore, the title page should include the full name(s) of the author(s), the affiliation(s) and address(es) of the author(s) and the e-mail address, telephone number of the corresponding author.
Please do not include a ‘Running Title’ or Funding information (which should be included in the Disclosure paragraph/Acknowledgements).
Authorship
Please note that neither the team of authors (additions or deletions), nor their order of appearance can be changed after submission.
Further, the order in which the author names appear in the title page is binding for publication. The manuscript can only be submitted by one of the authors and not by other staff members or assistants; all authors must be listed in the title page as well as in the respective fields in the submission system.
Joint first or last authorship is possible for papers published in Insights into Imaging. When submitting your manuscript, please mention the equal contributions in the title page of your paper.
Cover Letter
Authors must include a cover letter with their submission. All cover letters must address the following items:
- 1-2 sentences about the importance of the manuscript.
- 1-2 sentences about the experience the author group has on the topic (for example, previous publications).
- 1-2 sentences about the (expected) clinical impact of the manuscript.
Main text document containing the following
Abstract:
The abstract should be structured into Objectives – Methods – Results – Conclusions and consist of no more than 250 words (the headings are included in the word count).
Please note that the abstracts of Critical and Educational Reviews, Guidelines, Statements and Opinions do not need to be structured.
Keywords:
In order to aid online searching, three to five keywords should be listed representing the main content of the article.
Key points:
All submissions require 3 to 5 key points that highlight the main message(s) of the article. Ideally, each key point should contain no more than 12 words and be aimed at a general audience.
Company names:
The policy of Insights into Imaging does not allow company names to be published in titles, abstracts, keywords and key points. However, company names can be written in full (i.e. company, city and country in parentheses) in the main text.
Abbreviations and acronyms:
Only standard and regularly used acronyms should be employed. Abbreviations must be defined at their first use in the abstract, main text, and table/figure legends.
Introduction/Background:
This section should state why the paper is relevant to the readers and the main aspects that will be covered/evaluated as objectives. In reviews, authors should provide information on their personal experience (briefly, number of evaluated cases, statistics, imaging and clinical perspectives in their department/hospital) to guarantee authors’ knowledge on the topic.
In this section, please check if the manuscript has identified main statements, the focus has been accurately described, is of interest to the medical community, is innovative and has application in daily practice, is concise and precise.
Methodology:
The authors must specify if the approval of the institution’s ethics committee has been obtained, as well as the informed consent in the studies that require it. In scientific manuscripts, authors should clearly identify the character of your scientific study as experimental (interventional) or observational (non-experimental, non-interventional) study, including the number of study subjects, how, when, and where the subjects were recruited, and how informed consent was obtained. Authors are encouraged to consider that biases and other aspects that can give rise to confusion have been handled.
When needed, all materials and instruments should be clearly identified with their name and origin.
Throughout the manuscript, authors are encouraged to evaluate the statements flowing levels of evidence (Martí-Bonmatí L (2021) Evidence levels in radiology: the insights into imaging approach. Insights Imaging 12, 45. doi: 10.1186/s13244-021-00995-7).
Results/Conclusion:
This should state clearly the main conclusions and include an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.
Discussion:
The discussion should be an interpretation of the results and their significance with reference to work by other authors. The final paragraph should provide a concluding interpretation of the results in terms of the original problem. This conclusion should be succinct and discussion points should not be repeated.
Declarations:
All manuscripts must contain the section ‘Declarations’. Please see below for more information about this section.
Availability of data and materials:
The journal encourage that used data sets analyzed during the study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
References:
Citations must contain a strong reflection on recent literature, following Springer’s basic referencing style:
Nikolić O, Sousa FAe, Cunha TM et al (2021) Vulvar cancer staging: guidelines of the European Society of Urogenital Radiology (ESUR). Insights Imaging 12, 131. doi: 10.1186/s13244-021-01075-6
The list of references should only include published works that are cited in the text and that have been published. Personal communications and manuscripts that have not been accepted at the point of submission (and have no Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number) can be mentioned within the text in brackets (e.g. “Radiography of the hand” by Brown N, Smith A et al, submitted in August 2009, European Radiology”).
The authors should make efforts to cite papers that are truly providing the referred information, and not articles that report opinions of other researchers.
References should be listed in the order that they appear in the text. For further information on reference style see References section below.
Table and Figure legends:
Each table and each Ffigure must have a legend. These should be listed together after the reference section in the main text file as well as being included in the metadata of the graphic files.
Page numbers:
Please make sure to number the pages in your main document to facilitate the review process. Line numbers for each page will be created automatically in the PDF of your manuscript.
Font, Style:
Submission texts should be double spaced, and in Arial (11pt) or Times New Roman (12pt) font.
Limit on number of words, tables and figures:
Articles submitted to Insights into Imaging have the following limits:
- Pictorial & Critical Reviews, Guidelines and Position Papers: 5,000 words, max. 5 tables and max. 12 figures
- Original articles and Statements: 3,000 words, max. 5 tables and max. 6 figures
- Opinions: 1,000 words, max. 2 tables, max. 4 figures
Revised and resubmitted manuscripts:
When a revised manuscript is submitted, the authors must take care to include a detailed point-by-point response to the comments raised by the reviewers. Also, apart from a clean copy of the manuscript, a annotated version with track changes, should be included.
Illustrations and tables
Figure and table legends should be listed together after the reference section in the main text file.
Figures and tables should be provided as separate files, not embedded in the main text file.
Recommended file formats for figures: EPS, JPG, TIFF
Figure captions must be brief and provide clear explanations of the illustrations. The file name of each image should include the figure number (e.g. figure_2a.tif) and figure numbers and captions should be included only in the text and not embedded in the figure file.
Tables must be numbered in Arabic numbers and should include a title. All abbreviations in the table must be explained and footnotes in tables are denoted by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data).
Mathematical equations should be inserted using the Word equation tool, or formulae can be embedded in the text as image files. It is not possible to upload LaTeX source files or PDFs.
References
Citations in the text should be in Arabic numerals typed in square brackets, e.g. [2, 5, 12]. References must be listed in the order in which they appear in the text.
Journal titles should be abbreviated according to the Index Medicus. Only if the complete citation is not available (journal, issue and page range), should the DOI be given. Authors should follow the examples shown below.
Journal articles
1. Ward J, Robinson PJ (2002) How to detect hepatocellular carcinoma in cirrhosis. Eur Radiol 12:2258-2272
2. Ward J, Robinson PJ (2002) How to detect hepatocellular carcinoma in cirrhosis. Eur Radiol. DOI:10.1007/s00330-002-1450-y
Books
3. Larcher W (1995) Physiological plant ecology, 3rd edn. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York
Multi-author book
5. World Health Organization (2000) Title of subordinate document. World Health Organization, Geneva. Available via http://www.who.int/whr/2008/en/index.html. Accessed 26 Oct 2008
Online document
5. World Health Organization (2000) Title of subordinate document. World Health Organization, Geneva. Available via http://www.who.int/whr/2008/en/index.html. Accessed 26 Oct 2008
If there are 6 authors or less, the names of all authors should be provided (i.e. ‘et al’ should not be used). If there are 7 authors or more, only the names of the first 3 authors in the list should be given followed by ‘et al’
Article types
Original articles
Original articles are scientific works with a clear hypothesis and an experimental design to explore observations and answer questions related to imaging. Original articles should have a maximum of 3,000 words, 5 tables and 6 figures.
Pictorial review
Pictorial Review Papers focus on the educational aspects of imaging, with a pearls and pitfalls approach, and on the revision of imaging criteria. Authors should briefly provide their experience on the topic. Pictorial reviews should have a maximum of 5,000 words, 5 tables and 12 figures.
Critical review
Critical Review Papers focus on overviews on emerging techniques or state-of-the-art topics with an up-to-date and innovative approach. They provide access to the best evidence-base knowledge, analyzing and summarizing the increasing output of scientific publications. They might find common concepts from reviewed material, test a hypothesis based on published evidence, or analyze systematic discrepancies to consolidate what has been achieved. Critical reviews should have a maximum of 5,000 words, 5 tables and 12 figures.
Opinion
Opinion papers are short articles of contemporary interest. An Opinion is, generally, a “Letter to the Editor” or a commentary on a previously published article (Insights into Imaging or another journal) and should have a maximum of 1,000 words, 2 tables and 4 figures. Generally, the Editor in Chief will revise each Opinion submission and decide whether it will be published in the journal as a regular publication or whether it will be published solely on the Insights into Imaging website (without a DOI).
Guidelines and Position Papers
Guidelines and Position Papers aim to determine a course of action or to streamline particular processes according to a sound practice. They must be generated by experts in consensus, using evidence levels approaches, aiding to good clinical practice by helping physicians weigh the benefits and risks of a particular technical performance, diagnostic procedure, or therapeutic action. They also include any opinion or statement related to the imaging value chain and patient’s management aspects on imaging related topics.
Statements
Statements are evidence based analyses of issues relevant to health services, health care management, public health and health policy. Authors are expected to integrate findings, ideas and/or conceptual frameworks from a variety of sources in a clear and balanced way for our professional improvement..
Case Reports
Case reports are not accepted in Insights into Imaging and should be sent to the European Society of Radiology’s case platform EURORAD, which welcomes the submission of interesting and educational case reports, and makes them accessible for the readers as blinded teaching cases.
All case reports undergo peer review in EURORAD to maintain the highest possible scientific quality and are fully citable through an individual DOI.
Declarations
All manuscripts submitted to Insights into Imaging must contain a “Declarations section” at the end of the main text. The information listed below must be included:
- Ethics approval and consent to participate
- Consent for publication
- Availability of data and material
- Competing interests*
- Funding
- Authors’ contributions
- Acknowledgements
- Authors’ information (optional)
For more information, please visit the SpringerOpen site here.
*Please note that all articles authored by the journal’s Editorial board member must include a statement acknowledging their position.
A template of the “Declarations section” can be downloaded by clicking on the link below.
Copyright and permission
For more information regarding copyright and reprinting, please see the Open Acces Section.