Author Instructions

Style and language

Community Practitioner only accept submissions in English. Spelling. Abbreviations should be used only when necessary and should be defined when they are first used. SI units should be used throughout.

All submissions are professionally edited before publication

In order to make manuscript submission as easy as possible for authors, we have introduced format-free initial submission for journal, which requires a Word version upon initial submission to enable accurate length estimation.

At first submission, authors can submit their manuscript in any format; however, we do still encourage authors to read the manuscript preparation guidelines below and to consider how easy a manuscript is to read by reviewers and editors.

Where applicable, manuscripts must adhere to our guidelines regarding length and number of authors which will be communicated if needed.

For the article to considered for publication, the main manuscript must be submitted as an editable file, not a PDF, and the source files of any figures and tables must be provided

Submissions should include the following sections.

TITLE PAGE

Your article title should be a short description of the research you are reporting. The best titles are written with both human readers and search engines in mind; including keywords in your title will help readers discover your article online. Excessively long titles should be avoided. The title page should also contain full names and affiliations for each author

ABSTRACT

The abstract should be no more than 200 words and should not contain references or unexplained abbreviations or acronyms. Your abstract should be concise and informative and should read well as a standalone piece. The general scope of the article as well as the main results and conclusions should be summarised. You should aim to include likely search terms, to assist indexers (e.g. PubMed) that scan only the title and abstract of articles.

KEYWORDS

Please include at least 3 and up to 10 keywords. Try to avoid overly broad or specialised terms that might be meaningless to a reader.

Think about the words you would use to search online for articles on the same topic; these often make the best keywords. They do not necessarily need to be single words; keywords can include short phrases or terms that are easily recognised by researchers in your field. Consider also including synonyms for your keywords

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Please acknowledge anyone who contributed to the study but did not meet the authorship criteria

REFERENCES

Our journal uses a system based on Vancouver style referencing. All references to the literature cited will be given in the order of their appearance in the text in a consecutively numbered list at the end of the article.

Please note that references to datasets must also be included in the reference list with DOIs where available.

Each reference should contain as many of the following elements as possible:

  • Author surnames with initials (up to 10 before et al. is used)
  • Year of publication
  • Title of paper or book
  • Journal name using standard abbreviation
  • Volume number
  • Book publisher and location
  • First and last page numbers, or article number
  • Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

 

All figures and tables should be numbered and cited in the text.

Figure and table captions are required and should be brief and informative and include any relevant copyright information, if taken from a published source.

Images should be minimally processed and accurately reflect the original data. Authors should retain their unprocessed data and metadata files, as editors may request them to aid in manuscript evaluation. 

Suggested style for figure labels:

  • Font: Times New Roman
  • 9pt, 11pt leading is preferred. Text can be reduced, where necessary or restricted for space, but should be no smaller than 7.5pt
  • Numbers and units: please use a thin space between values and units (e.g. 300 nm, 400 μm)
  • In numbers, thousands should be separated by thin spaces, not commas (e.g. 10 000 000)
  • Equal-to sign: please insert a full space either side (e.g. x = 300)

Suggested style for multipart figures:

  • Figure parts should be labelled alphabetically and in a consistent manner (left to right, then top to bottom)
  • All figure parts should be labelled in the same position
  • If a label interferes with the figure content, it should be placed outside the figure part (top left)
  • Alphabetical labels should be italicized in roman brackets, e.g. ‘(a)’
  • Sub-parts should be labelled using bracketed roman numberals, e.g. ‘(ii)’
  • Figure labels that appear on a coloured background, should be placed inside a white circle

All figures will be published in colour online (the version of the record), but will be reproduced in black and white in any print versions by default. If you feel that print colour is essential for any of your figures, please list the relevant figure numbers on submission of your article.

Figures from other sources should be fully acknowledged in the caption, and written permission sought for both print and electronic reproduction before being used (where relevant). 

If publishing an open access paper, the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence will cover all components of the paper, so any third party material used (e.g. figures) will also fall under this usage agreement. Permission must be obtained to use any material in this way, and copyright holders must be aware of the terms. This may affect how the same material can be used in other situations. If material cannot be included under the CC-BY licence then this must be identified within the text, e.g. by adding copyright information to the figure caption, or material must be identified to our production team so that the relevant information can be added to the general copyright line for the paper. 

Submit your manuscript/research papers to

editor@commprac.uk

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