Guidelines
Electronic Publishing
Guidelines for Submission
A. Statement of Content
The Albany Medical Review is intended as a reflection of that process by which residents both participate in and further their own education as well as their peers'. To that end, its contents should reflect the integrity and diversity found at Albany Medical Center (AMC) and the Stratton Veterans Hospital (DVA). The major categories included in the reviews, case reports, electrocardiograms, and radiological studies, shall be original subject material found in a resident's experience at AMC. Each shall have, at minimum, three references.
Case reports shall be a means of presenting an approach to diagnosis and management of a patient, tracing the logical progression of the case and the thought process that took place by those caring for the patient. The basic outline of a case report should therefore be as follows:
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History
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Physical examination findings
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Discussion of the initial differential diagnosis and narrowing of the diagnosis
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Investigations including laboratory values and radiology information (please avoid nonstandard abbreviations)
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Interpretation of the data
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Final diagnosis of the case, including a detailed discussion of the etiology
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How the diagnosis was substantiated
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How the patient was managed
Electrocardiograms shall be original tracings from AMC or DVA with the appropriate history provided and a discussion to follow that includes appropriate references. Radiographs shall be original images from AMC or DVA, with appropriate history, discussion, and references.
Topic reviews may start with brief reference to a pertinent case and should be based on a current literature investigation and search. Appropriate review articles should be referenced in proper form.
All pertinent sources including web addresses with the date of the page or electronic media must be documented appropriately. Printed or electronic copies of all referenced material should be made available on request within 4 working days.
B. Technical Guidelines
Your submission should be in Microsoft Word®, or RTF. Please submit your disk with a printed copy of the manuscript. Please make back-up copies prior to submission, as these will only be returned for any corrections or re-writes.
The presentation format should be simple. Thoughtfully composed figures, tables and lists often help to accentuate key concepts and data. In general, we recommend conforming to common practices in standard medical journals such as using generic name of drugs, italicizing non-English words (e.g., organism names) and avoiding ward lingo or shorthand (e.g., ‘pt’ for patient, ‘Cx’ for culture, ‘echo’ for echocardiogram, ‘vitals’ for vital signs, ‘BP’ for blood pressure). Use of abbreviations and acronyms is often an art of balancing between clarity, readability and conciseness. We recommend spelling out all but the most commonly accepted abbreviations and acronyms (e.g., EKG, AST, COPD, CHF) on their first occurrence with their abbreviations or acronyms put in parentheses before their subsequent use.
Text should be single-spaced, single-column, left and right justified, without any carriage return except a double carriage return between paragraphs. Special formatting should be limited to standard bold, italics or bold italics, which are generally preserved when a document is imported into the web publisher. The font should be Arial and mixing fonts is discouraged. Please adhere to the following formatting guidelines for uniformity:
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No photographs, tables, or other graphics may be taken from a website, book, or other copyrighted location without express permission of the author, and may not be 'copied and pasted' into any work. All graphic, photo, sound, or video files should be submitted separately even if they are already embedded in the document, preferably on CD-R or ZipTM diskette. If they are not embedded, please specify where they should be located in the document. In general, it is important to submit the highest quality original possible as digital image processing can only filter out background noise and enhance the readability of the image but cannot re-create missing information lost in the initial image conversion process. Preferred format for graphics is JPG. For graphics that do not contain complex colors and/or photographic material, GIF will probably suffice. Graphics are displayed with a horizontal dimension of 6.25 inches. Resolution is in multiples of 72 dpi (pixels per inch). For optimal quality and compactness, graphics should have a minimum resolution of 144 dpi with a horizontal dimension of 900 pixels. 288 dpi with 1800 horizontal pixels is even better. For JPG files, using a compression ratio of about 50% generally yields a compact file with good quality.
For EKG’s, a printed duplicate with pink grids is preferred. This allows us to scan in the image with the optimal quality. If an EKG must be photocopied, please experiment with the darkness and contrast setting until you get a photocopy with the background grids significantly lighter than the EKG tracings, otherwise the background grids cannot be pushed back into the background no matter how we process the image.
Sound files should be in either AIFF or MP3. Movie files are preferred in QuicktimeTM or DV format. As sound and video require high bandwidth expect high compression when published.
Remember to place your name, email address and contact number with each submission. All personal information received is regarded as confidential. If you would like a preview of your submission before final publication, please indicate so.
We reserve the right to change or add to these guidelines as necessary.
C. Ethical Guidelines
The Albany Medical Review is an on-line journal written by internal medicine staff and house staff. According to the HIPPA advisor at the Albany Veterans Hospital and the Institutional Review Board at Albany Medical Center, contents of each submission may not include patient identifying information such as patient or family names, initials, ethnicity (unless medically pertinent), date of birth, medical record number, address, social security number, dates of admission, names of attendings of record. Age should be given as a range ("late 50's"). In general, only personal information that is pertinent to the academic discussion should be included.
This publication is considered exempt research and each individual author does not need to contact the patient or family that is presented in each case. However, if any picture of any body part is presented, the patient's identity must be concealed. More importantly, a signed consent must be obtained from the patient or family, given to the AMR editorial staff and placed in the medical record.
No consent is necessary for EKG's, radiographic studies, or pathological images as long as patient identifying information is deleted.