Executive Editor’s message: Implications (May 19)
The journal staff has been working to update the author guidelines. Our goal is to provide more details and supporting files to assist authors with formatting their manuscripts for submission to the Journal of Swine Health and Production. Time is a hot commodity amongst authors, and the journal wants to provide as much guidance as possible to help speed up the formatting process for submitting authors. The other benefit to authors is that a correctly formatted manuscript does facilitate a smoother peer-review process, as a correctly formatted manuscript is easier for reviewers to review. So, I am hoping these changes and supporting files will result in a win-win! The full version of the author guidelines is now available online with an abbreviated version to be printed in the next issue of the journal. I want to use my messages in this and future issues to highlight some of the key format changes. In this message, I am going to begin with the implications section.
Perhaps the most notable change you will notice is in the implications section. You will now see that there are character restrictions for the implications section. The implications, in my opinion, are the most challenging part of the manuscript for authors to write, the most challenging aspect to peer-review, and, above-all, the most important section for a busy reader (ie, busy practitioner). Many readers, practitioner or not, are overwhelmed with the number of manuscripts to read. Many people will prescreen a manuscript using the abstract and the implications to make a decision as to whether they will continue reading. It is not only applied-based journals that include an implications section. Many scientific journals include an implications section, but sometimes under a different name, eg, key research findings.
Why the change in the implications formatting requirements? The primary reason is to keep them succinct. The secondary reason is that authors often present new information not addressed in the manuscript. It is also not uncommon for authors to over extrapolate information within the implications. These challenges are addressed in the peer-review process, but they are often a bottle-neck for the review process and how timely a manuscript can move on to being accepted. The intention is to limit the characters so that significant thought and care goes into the construction of an implication or implications. What I am saying is that, yes, the character limit is going to make it harder to write implications. However, I think the reward will be well worth it. I will share a personal experience. I recently had to write key research findings for a manuscript submission with a very (very, very) short character restriction. It took many iterations between myself and my co-authors to finalize them. But wow, when we were done, they were really informative and yet succinct implications. In the end it made the manuscript far more informative and I think more assessable to my target audience. If I can do it, we all can!
On to the details, and so you do not need to search for some specific examples, here is a snippet from the online version of the author guidelines:
- Implications outline the practical application or impact of the study results or the “take-home” messages for readers. Implications should be presented as provisional to the parameters and conditions of the study and should not over-generalize the results.
- Manuscripts are limited to 3 bulleted implications, each with a maximum of 80 characters including spaces.
- Some questions that may be answered by the implications include:
- How do the results of this study connect with what has been previously published?
- What new ideas have been generated by this research?
- What are the limitations of the data, methods, or results of this study?
- What are the consequences of the most significant findings of this research?
- How do the outcomes of this research impact the question or situation presented in the manuscript?
If you took a big gulp when you read 80 characters (including spaces), that means you recognized the challenge that authors will face. As I mentioned, the journal has implemented this and other formatting requirement changes all with the overall goal to streamline and simplify the manuscript submission and peer-review process. I am excited to see this change rollout in upcoming issues and I hope you are as well.
Terri O’Sullivan, DVM, PhD
Executive Editor