Guidelines for Authors

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About the journal

The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care is an international, peer reviewed journal, publishing high-quality, original research. Please see the journal’s Aims & Scope for information about its focus and peer-review policy.

Please note that this journal only publishes manuscripts in English.

This journal accepts the following article types: Editorial, Research, New Developments, Clinical Study, Epidemiological Study, Historical/Socio-demographic Article, Review, Short Communication, Case Report, Debate, Book Review, Letter to the Editor, and Personal Opinion.

Peer review

Taylor & Francis is committed to peer-review integrity and upholding the highest standards of review. Once your paper has been assessed for suitability by the editor, it will then be single blind peer-reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees. Find out more about what to expect during peer review and read our guidance on publishing ethics.

Preparing your paper

All authors submitting to medicine, biomedicine, health sciences, allied and public health journals should conform to the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, prepared by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

Structure and word limits

Please include a word count for your paper.

Your paper should be compiled in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text (introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion); acknowledgments; disclosure statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (as a list). Please structure the main text of case reports as: introduction, case report, discussion, conclusion.

The introduction should not exceed 750 words and should not contain more than 10 references.
The discussion should not exceed 2250 words and should be structured. It should include the following headers:
1. Findings and interpretation;
2. Strengths and weaknesses of the study;
3. Differences in results and conclusions;
4. Relevance of the findings: implications for clinicians and policymakers;
5. Unanswered questions and future research.
The conclusion(s) section should not exceed 150 words.
Case reports should not exceed 2200 words in total.
Short communications should not exceed 2000 words in total. At most 2 figures and 2 tables are allowed, with the combination of figures and tables not exceeding 3.

Style guidelines

Please refer to these style guidelines when preparing your paper, rather than any published articles or a sample copy.

Please use British -ise spelling consistently throughout your manuscript.

Please use single quotation marks, except where ‘a quotation is “within” a quotation’. Please note that long quotations should be indented without quotation marks.

References to drugs should be made by their approved, not proprietary names, and the source of any new or experimental preparations should be given.

Formatting and templates

Papers may be submitted in any standard format, including Word and LaTeX. Figures should be saved separately from the text. To assist you in preparing your paper, we provide formatting templates.

Word templates are available for this journal. Please save the template to your hard drive, ready for use.

A LaTeX template is available for this journal. Please save the template to your hard drive, ready for use. If you are not able to use the templates via the links (or if you have any other template queries) please contact authortemplate@tandf.co.uk

References

Please use this reference guide when preparing your paper. An EndNote output style is also available to assist you.

Checklist: what to include

Author details. Please ensure everyone meeting the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME) requirements for authorship is included as an author of your paper. Please include all authors’ full names, affiliations, postal addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses on the cover page. Where available, please also includeORCiDs and social media handles (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn). One author will need to be identified as the corresponding author, with their email address normally displayed in the article PDF (depending on the journal) and the online article. Authors’ affiliations are the affiliations where the research was conducted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer-review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after your paper is accepted. Read more on authorship. Case reports should be authored by no more than 3 authors in total.
A structured abstract of no more than 250 words for Articles, or 160 words for Short Communications and Case Reports. A structured abstract should cover (in the following order): the purpose of the article, its materials and methods (the experimental system and procedures used), the results and conclusions. Please structure the abstract of case reports as: objectives, case, conclusions. Read tips on writing your abstract.
You can opt to include a video abstract with your article. Find out how these can help your work reach a wider audience, and what to think about when filming.
4-7 keywords. Read making your article more discoverable, including information on choosing a title and search engine optimization.
Funding details. Please supply all details required by your funding and grant-awarding bodies as follows:
For single agency grants: This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx].
For multiple agency grants: This work was supported by the [Funding Agency 1] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency 2] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency 3] under Grant [number xxxx].
Disclosure statement. This is to acknowledge any financial interest or benefit that has arisen from the direct applications of your research. Further guidance on what is a conflict of interest and how to disclose it.
Supplemental online material. Supplemental material can be a video, dataset, fileset, sound file or anything which supports (and is pertinent to) your paper. We publish supplemental material online via Figshare. Find out more about supplemental material and how to submit it with your article.
Figures. Figures should be high quality (1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for color, at the correct size). Figures should be saved as TIFF, PostScript or EPS files. More information on how to prepare artwork.
Tables. Tables should present new information rather than duplicating what is in the text. Readers should be able to interpret the table without reference to the text. Please supply editable files.
Equations. If you are submitting your manuscript as a Word document, please ensure that equations are editable. More information about mathematical symbols and equations.
Units. Please use SI units (non-italicized).

Using third-party material in your paper

You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission. More information on requesting permission to reproduce work(s) under copyright.

Disclosure statement

Please include a disclosure of interest statement, using the subheading “Disclosure of interest.” If you have no interests to declare, please state this (suggested wording: The authors report no conflicts of interest). For all NIH/Wellcome-funded papers, the grant number(s) must be included in the disclosure of interest statement. Read more on declaring conflicts of interest.

Clinical Trials Registry

In order to be published in a Taylor & Francis journal, all clinical trials must have been registered in a public repository at the beginning of the research process (prior to patient enrolment). Trial registration numbers should be included in the abstract, with full details in the methods section. The registry should be publicly accessible (at no charge), open to all prospective registrants, and managed by a not-for-profit organization. For a list of registries that meet these requirements, please visit the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP). The registration of all clinical trials facilitates the sharing of information among clinicians, researchers, and patients, enhances public confidence in research, and is in accordance with the ICMJE guidelines.

Complying with ethics of experimentation

Please ensure that all research reported in submitted papers has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, and is in full compliance with all relevant codes of experimentation and legislation. All papers which report in vivo experiments or clinical trials on humans or animals must include a written statement in the Methods section. This should explain that all work was conducted with the formal approval of the local human subject or animal care committees (institutional and national), and that clinical trials have been registered as legislation requires. Authors who do not have formal ethics review committees should include a statement that their study follows the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Consent

All authors are required to follow the ICMJE requirements on privacy and informed consent from patients and study participants. Please confirm that any patient, service user, or participant (or that person’s parent or legal guardian) in any research, experiment, or clinical trial described in your paper has given written consent to the inclusion of material pertaining to themselves, that they acknowledge that they cannot be identified via the paper; and that you have fully anonymized them. Where someone is deceased, please ensure you have written consent from the family or estate. Authors may use this Patient Consent Form, which should be completed, saved, and sent to the journal if requested.

Health and safety

Please confirm that all mandatory laboratory health and safety procedures have been complied with in the course of conducting any experimental work reported in your paper. Please ensure your paper contains all appropriate warnings on any hazards that may be involved in carrying out the experiments or procedures you have described, or that may be involved in instructions, materials, or formulae.

Please include all relevant safety precautions; and cite any accepted standard or code of practice. Authors working in animal science may find it useful to consult the International Association of Veterinary Editors’ Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare and Guidelines for the Treatment of Animals in Behavioural Research and Teaching. When a product has not yet been approved by an appropriate regulatory body for the use described in your paper, please specify this, or that the product is still investigational.

Submitting your paper

This journal uses ScholarOne Manuscripts to manage the peer-review process. If you haven’t submitted a paper to this journal before, you will need to create an account in the submission centre. Please read the guidelines above and then submit your paper in the relevant Author Centre, where you will find user guides and a helpdesk.

Please note that The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care usesCrossref™ to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care you are agreeing to originality checks during the peer-review and production processes.

On acceptance, we recommend that you keep a copy of your Accepted Manuscript. Find out more about sharing your work.

Publication charges

Copyright options

Copyright allows you to protect your original material, and stop others from using your work without your permission. Taylor & Francis offers a number of different license and reuse options, including Creative Commons licenses when publishing open access. Read more on publishing agreements.

Complying with funding agencies

We will deposit all National Institutes of Health or Wellcome Trust-funded papers into PubMedCentral on behalf of authors, meeting the requirements of their respective open access (OA) policies. If this applies to you, please tell our production team when you receive your article proofs, so we can do this for you. Check fundersâ€™ OA policy mandates here. Find out more about sharing your work.

For more information on license options, embargo periods and APCs for this journal please search for the journal in our journal list.

Article reprints

For enquiries about reprints, please contact the Taylor & Francis Author Services team atreprints@tandf.co.uk. To order a copy of the issue containing your article, please contact our Customer Services team at Adhoc@tandf.co.uk.

Queries

Should you have any queries, please visit our Author Services website or contact us atauthorqueries@tandf.co.uk.

Updated November 2016

Open Access

This journal gives authors the option to publish open access via our Open Select publishing program, making it free to access online immediately on publication. Many funders mandate publishing your research open access; you can check open access funder policies and mandates here.

Taylor & Francis Open Select gives you, your institution or funder the option of paying an article publishing charge (APC) to make an article open access. Please contactopenaccess@tandf.co.uk if you would like to find out more, or go to our Author Services website.

My Authored Works

On publication, you will be able to view, download and check your article’s metrics (downloads, citations and Altmetric data) via My Authored Works on Taylor & Francis Online. This is where you can access every article you have published with us, as well as your free eprints link, so you can quickly and easily share your work with friends and colleagues.

We are committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article. Here are some tips and ideas on how you can work with us to promote your research.

Guidelines for Authors