AJSM -- About American Journal of Sports Medicine

Submissions

The journal no longer accepts submissions by mail. Please submit manuscripts to our online submission site at http://ajsm-submit.highwire.org/.

| Manuscripts | References | Figures |  Tables |  Video |

Manuscripts must not be under simultaneous consideration by any other publication, before or during the peer-review process. Papers presented at AOSSM meetings must be submitted to the Journal for first rights of refusal. Authors are responsible for submitting papers of presentations directly to the Journal. Accepted manuscripts, including tables and figures, become the permanent property of the AOSSM and may not be published elsewhere without written permission from the copyright holder.

When manuscripts have been received by the editorial office, the corresponding author will be sent an acknowledgment giving an assigned manuscript number, which should be used with all subsequent correspondence or telephone or email contact for anything related to that particular manuscript. Authors will be asked to download the copyright transfer and conflict of interest forms. Both of these forms need to be signed by all authors and returned to the AJSM office. If you have a scanner, you may simply scan the signed forms and upload onto the submission site; if you do not, you may mail/FAX those forms to the editorial office and they will be scanned in for you. These forms must be in our possession before your paper can or will be published.

Articles intended for the "Current Concepts" section of the Journal are solicited by the Associate/Current Concepts Editor, Timothy E. Foster, MD. Please do NOT submit articles for this section; a query letter may be written to Dr. Foster regarding possible material or suggestions for this section. Any unsolicited systematic review papers will be evaluated by the current concepts editor for possible inclusion in the current concepts section. Systematic reviews will not be considered for the original research section of the Journal.

When accepted articles have been processed, authors will be required to carefully read and correct their manuscripts that have been copy edited by the publisher. Any extensive changes made by authors on the page proofs (except for correction of typographical errors) will be charged to authors at the rate of $2 a line. Authors are responsible for ordering reprints of their articles; a reprint order form is provided with the page proofs for this purpose.

Material published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine is copyrighted material and may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of the copyright holder.

Manuscript Formats

Manuscript pages should be typed double-spaced with the pages and lines numbered. Generally, manuscripts should be 6500 words or fewer.
Please Note: Manuscripts will be converted to a PDF (portable document format) file that reviewers may download to read. Therefore, be sure that there is NO identifying material anywhere on the submitted manuscript. Authors will be asked to enter all of the identification information separately, so please delete all of this on the manuscript to be uploaded. Remember to check throughout the paper. If there is identification material on the uploaded file, the author will be asked to delete it and upload again, so please save yourselves this time/action. The system handles most common word processing formats; however, Word and PDF are preferred. To ensure that the resulting PDF file is readable, we recommend that you use only certain fonts in your Microsoft Word or WordPerfect document: Times, Times Roman, Courier, Helvetica, Arial, and the Symbol font for special characters. Using other fonts will make the PDF more difficult to read. Submission of a manuscript implies that all authors know and approve the content of the article. PLEASE NOTE: Journal policy discourages the inclusion of more than five authors on an article. If more than five authors are listed, the contribution of each author to the work should be explained in the transmittal letter. Other persons who contributed significantly to the work should be included in the "Acknowledgments" section.

Abstract

Abstracts should summarize the contents of the article in 250 words or less. The abstract should be structured in the following format:
Background: In one or two sentences, summarize the scientific body of knowledge surrounding your study and how this led to your investigation.
Hypothesis: State the theory (ies) that you are attempting to prove or disprove by your study.
Study Design: Identify the overall design of your study. See list below.
Methods: Succinctly summarize the overall methods you used in your investigation. Include the study population, type of intervention, method of data collection and length of the study.
Results: Report the most important results of your study. Only include positive results that are statistically significant, or negative results that are supported by adequate power.
Conclusions: State the answer to your original question or hypothesis. Summarize the most important conclusions that can be directly drawn from your study.
Clinical Relevance: If yours was a laboratory study, describe its relevance to clinical sports medicine.
Key Terms: Provide at least 4 key words for indexing.

Study Designs

Meta-analysis: A systematic overview of studies that pools results of two or more studies to obtain an overall answer to a question or interest. Summarizes quantitatively the evidence regarding a treatment, procedure, or association.
Systematic Review: An article that examines published material on a clearly described subject in a systematic way. There must be a description of how the evidence on this topic was tracked down, from what sources and with what inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial: A group of patients is randomized into an experimental group and a control group. These groups are followed up for the variables / outcomes of interest.
Crossover Study Design: The administration of two or more experimental therapies one after the other in a specified or random order to the same group of patients.
Cohort Study: Involves identification of two groups (cohorts) of patients, one which did receive the exposure of interest, and one which did not, and following these cohorts forward for the outcome of interest.
Case-control Study:A study that involves identifying patients who have the outcome of interest (cases) and patients without the same outcome (controls), and looking back to see if they had the exposure of interest.
Cross-Sectional Study: The observation of a defined population at a single point in time or time interval. Exposure and outcome are determined simultaneously.
Case Series: Describes characteristics of a group of patients with a particular disease or who have undergone a particular procedure. No control group is used in the study, although the discussion may compare the results to others published in the literature.
Case Report: Similar to the Case Series, except that only one or a small group of cases is reported.
Descriptive Epidemiology Study: Observational study describing the injuries occurring in a particular sport.
Controlled Laboratory Study: An in vitro or in vivo investigation in which one group receiving an experimental treatment is compared to one or more groups receiving no treatment or an alternate treatment.
Descriptive Laboratory Study: An in vivo or in vitro study that describes characteristics such as anatomy, physiology, or kinesiology of a broad range of subjects or a specific group of interest.
Abstracts longer than 250 words will be edited and the corresponding author will be asked to approve the reduced abstract or to assist in shortening it to the required length. Abbreviations are not allowed in abstracts.

Text

In general, follow the standard IMRAD (Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion) format for writing scientific articles. The author is responsible for all statements made in the work, including copy editor changes, which the author will have an opportunity to verify. Any material that is submitted with an article (such as tables and figures) that has been reproduced in another source (that is, that has been copyrighted previously) must conform to the current copyright regulations. It is the author's responsibility to obtain written permission for reproduction of copyrighted material and for providing the editorial office with that documentation before the material will be reproduced in the Journal. A permission request form is available on the submission site.

Reports on surgery, except in rare instances, require a minimum follow-up of two years.

Use generic names of drugs. If a particular brand was used in a study, insert the brand name along with the name and location of the manufacturer in parentheses after the generic name.

Put the name and location of equipment manufacturers in parentheses behind the name of the product.

Units of measure following a number are abbreviated (such as kg, cm, ml). Use metric units in measurements (that is, centimeter versus inch, kilogram versus pound). Journal policy is to limit use of abbreviations; abbreviated terms that are not used frequently in an article will be spelled out. Common abbreviations are used without definition (such as ACL, EMG, MRI). When uncommon abbreviations are used, give the full term followed by the abbreviation in parentheses the first time it is mentioned in the text, such as femur-ACL-tibia complex (FATC).

Acknowledgments

Type acknowledgments in the box provided on the submission page. Give credit to sponsors, donors, or grantors; technical assistants; and professional colleagues who contributed to the quality of the paper but are not listed as authors. Please briefly describe the contributions made by persons being acknowledged in this section. Journal policy precludes acknowledgment of the manuscript typist.

References

References should be typed double-spaced in alphabetical order and numbered according to the alphabetical listing. If references are not in alphabetical order the uploaded file will be REJECTED and will have to be resubmitted with the references in the correct form. When author entries are the same, alphabetize by the first word of the title. In general, use the Index Medicus form for abbreviating journal titles and the AMA Manual of Style for format. Note: references must be retrievable. Do not include in the reference list presentations from meetings that have not been published. Data such as presentations and articles that have been submitted for publication but have not been accepted must be put in the text as unpublished data immediately after mention of the information (for example, "Smith and Jones (unpublished data, 2000) noted in their study . . .").

References will be linked to Medline citations for the reviewers. Authors can include articles that are in Publish-Ahead-of-Print mode. These articles are cited in Medline. To ensure that the references are linked correctly, please provide the PMID number from Medline at the end of the reference. For example: Emery CA, Meeuwisse WH. Injury Rates, Risk Factors, and Mechanisms of Injury in Minor Hockey. Am J Sports Med. 2006 Jul 21; [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 16861577

It is imperative that authors double-check their references and assure that they are correct and complete!

Figures (Illustrations)

Formats accepted for review are GIF, TIFF, EPS, JPEG. Formats not supported include the following: Any file utilizing OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) technology to display information or embed files, Bitmap (.bmp), PICT (.pict), Excel (.xls), Photoshop (.psd), Canvas (.cnv), CorelDRAW (.cdr) and locked or encrypted PDFs. Multi-page PowerPoint files (.ppt) are not supported; one slide per file is acceptable. Your images will be converted to PDF and appended to your manuscript file. If your images are included within your manuscript file you do not need to upload them separately.

Color will be used in the journal where needed (example, histology slides or arthroscopic surgery photographs). All other figures, such as bar graphs and charts, should be submitted in black and white. Be sure all symbols or arrows are described in the legend. If figure parts are provided, the legend must clearly state what is happening in each part of the figure. Terms used for labels and in the legend must be consistent with those in the text.

Figures for papers accepted for publication must meet the requirements of the publisher, Sage Publications. Files for line drawings should be created at 1200 dpi, for color photographs at 300 dpi, and for black and white photographs at 300 dpi. Please remember that many image formats (such as JPEG and GIF) are not acceptable for reproduction in the Journal. You can check the quality of your figures at the Preflight tool for our printer http://dx.sheridan.com/

Figures should be submitted in the original form created. Images embedded in Word or PowerPoint are not acceptable for publication. Glossy prints can be sent to the journal once the paper is accepted if you cannot meet the digital art requirements for publication.

Examine all figures carefully to ensure that the data are presented with the greatest possible clarity and that the inclusion of the figure helps the reader better understand the text. Likewise, determine if a figure would communicate the information more effectively than lengthy narrative.

All photographs of patients that disclose their identity must be accompanied by a signed photographic release, granting permission for their likeness to be reproduced in the article. If this is not provided, the patient's eyes must be occluded to prevent recognition.

Please remember that it is the author's responsibility to obtain and submit signed permission to reproduce any copyrighted figures that have been published previously. A permission form can be downloaded from the submission site.

Tables

For tables, the system accepts most common word processing formats. Tables should be numbered consecutively, and have a title. Please be sure the title is not a "tag," but that it describes the content and purpose of the table. Tables should enhance, not duplicate, information in the text. Simple tables that repeat textual material will be deleted.

Please remember that it is the author's responsibility to obtain and submit signed permission to reproduce any copyrighted tables that have been published previously.

Video

Videos may be submitted with a manuscript and, if approved by the editor, will be posted online with the article when published. For more information about the format requirements for videos, please review the Video Format Guide. For detailed information pertaining to copyright and permissions requirements, view the Video Permission and Fair Use Quick Guide. For videos with identifiable subjects, subjects will need to sign the Audio-Visual Likeness Release form. It is the author's responsibility to submit signed release forms, if necessary, for each video.

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